Mellan krav och tillit Styrningens konsekvenser för utbildning

This essay explores different perspectives on governance in Swedish education as expressed in two different government texts. The purpose is to show how the roll of the teacher might be understood in relation to the governance of education and its public and private goals. Theoretically the study relies on two main theoretical frames used in different stages of a three-step analysis. The first two steps use the concepts autonomy – control in order to analyze the governance of education. These concepts are applied to understand how the two texts that make up the empirical material formulate different types of governance. Specific attention is directed towards the teacher’s professional space considering autonomy – control looked at in the second step of analysis. The third step in turn uses the concepts public good and private good based in the largely Swedish field of curriculum theory to understand what implications different kinds of governance might have for larger questions about the purpose of education. The results show that the two texts that make up the empirical basis of the analysis form different perspectives on governance of education and seek to meet separate goals. One of the texts views governance of education highly as a mean to evaluate students, schools and the school system. This text therefore focuses mainly on technical aspects of governance. The other text in turn can be viewed as a reaction to a detailed technical view of governance as a mean for evaluation. Instead a perspective where governance of education should trust the knowledge of teachers is presented. Teachers in turn should be responsive to students’ needs and views on their education. The purpose of governance visible in this text leans mainly towards achieving goals that are not easily measured. The two unveiled perspectives show that varying types of governance fulfill different purposes based on their design. This in turn affects the way in which education is able to fulfill public and private needs