Toward Understanding Education Policy: An Integrative Approach

Abstract

This study was initiated within the context of a collaborative project between the writers that aimed at comparing the centralization/decentralization dynamics in Europe and South Africa. The need for a comprehensive theoretical model of the education policy process that would enable this comparison in countries with diverse and changing education governance structures, but that are being shaped by similar forces within the global context, resulted in this critical review of more recent theoretical journal articles on education policy. Based on the notion that education policy forms part of a process that endeavors to impose values on the future and therefore as part of the power struggle to control the future of education, the article reflects a critical review of some of the prominent notions underpinning and shaping the education policy debate, as well as proposes an integrative macro theoretical mapping of the education policy process.