Innovative Orthodoxies and Old Bedfellows – Re(drawing) the Geometries of Education Governance

This chapter presents a very broad synopsis of the intensification of education governance. It opens by narrating the multifaceted nature of governance and in what way it has developed as the axiom for professed policy problems that national educational systems are experiencing. The chapter chronicles the amplification of education governance and it explicates the metamorphosis and myriad typographies that “governance” has taken in responding to perceived endogenous and exogenous policy problems. It explains how managerialism and neo-corporate reforms sought to destabilize the activities of education governance and the results. In making this argument, it suggests that new public management policy prescriptions in education were part of the earliest form of disruptive innovation in education. It advances that educational managerialism, in hollowing out national educational systems, has generated the perfect breeding ground for the rise of newer modus operandi (or modes, styles, and arrangements) that governs and regulates education systems through the use of different techniques and mechanisms. The second half of the chapter discusses five different modus operandi that are inchoate in the post-managerialist era and highlights that in education, we have progressed beyond the movement from government to governance across national education systems and these systems are now employing additional modes of governance (vertical and horizontal) across different scales. The chapter concludes by drawing on the concept of a “Wicked Problem” (an unsolvable or difficult problematic, that is, fluid, paradoxical, and unfinished) to insinuate that education governance is an example of a wicked problem that has been and continues to be shaped by the ideological contours of endogenous and exogenous policy influences.