Institutional change in postsocialist education: The case of Poland

In the early 1980s, institutional and development researchers began to question why schools in different countries around the world increasingly appeared alike in formal design, organization, and function. Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer (1985) offered a seminal neo-institutional argument that schools around the world are increasingly drawn up by the global sweep of modernization. A prerequisite for any country wishing to engage with and compete in the modern world, the authors argued, is establishing a system of mass schooling based on a set of core institutional standards and values that originated in the west but have since expanded around the globe. These standards and values require that schools be universally accessible and socially progressive, capably of equally and equitably integrating a citizenry – regardless of racial, ethnic, and gender-related distinctions – into the nation-state. The world model of education described by these theorists provides not so much an organizational blueprint for building modern school systems as a cultural schema for defining the national polity and forging a modern society through education. What makes schools everywhere look and act the same, they claim, is the utter invariability of this schema.[T]he striking thing about modern mass education is that everywhere in the world the same interpretative scheme underlies the observed reality. Even in the most remote peasant villages, administrators, teachers, pupils, and parents invoke these institutional rules and struggle to construct schools that conform to them. (p. 147)