How far is the Global Education Reform Model globally effective ? A comparison of the relationships between student attainment and school accountability, autonomy and institutional diversity within and across national educational systems.

The Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) originated in the UK and US four decades ago and its prescriptions are now advanced by international development organisations as the means to raise student attainment across the world. GERM is associated with the promotion of external school accountability through the publication of assessment results, school autonomy, and school diversity to increase parental choice and bolster school independence. Aspects of GERM have been widely adopted across many member countries of the OECD and research in these countries has reported some modest gains in student attainment, but overall findings have been ambivalent. Research investigating the effectiveness of GERM in developing countries has mostly focused on single aspects of the model, such as autonomy, yet has also reported inconclusive and contradictory findings. The present study aimed to address some of the limitations of previous research by making transnational comparisons of the effectiveness of GERM using a balanced sample of non-OECD countries from the 2015 PISA cycle, which were drawn equally from four global regions and from different levels of development, and all of which had implemented GERM related reforms; within this sample the effectiveness of GERM was also investigated at an individual country level in Trinidad & Tobago, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Indonesia. Multilevel modelling was used to explore the associations between external accountability, school autonomy and school diversity and student maths attainment, alongside the variables of accountability to parents, internal accountability (school tracking by regulators), educational material shortages, teacher certification and principals’ leadership effectiveness which have also been proposed as factors relevant to student attainment. The main findings suggested that external accountability was modestly associated with higher levels of student attainment in high and middle income countries, but not in the least developed countries. Internal accountability showed positive associations with student attainment in low income countries. School autonomy was not associated with student attainment in developed countries, but showed a positive association with attainment in middle income countries, and an association with lower levels of attainment in the least developed countries. School diversity did not appear to be associated with higher student attainment in developed countries, but in middle and low income countries students attending independent schools appeared to have markedly lower levels of attainment than peers at public schools. Educational material shortages were associated with lower levels of attainment in middle and low income countries, but not in the most developed countries. Teacher certification showed no associations with student attainment, and principal leadership effectiveness was only associated with student attainment in Indonesia. Overall, the associations between the GERM related variables and student attainment were modest, inconsistent and accounted for a relatively low proportion of the variance in student attainment between and within countries. This, and the fact that other variables appeared to be more salient to attainment in some countries, suggested that GERM might not provide a consistent or comprehensive template for global education reforms to raise student attainment. Therefore, although some of the measures promoted by GERM might be associated with higher student attainment in some countries, it was concluded that GERM related reforms might not be globally effective.