Transnational Forces in Dutch Educational Policies and Practices

This chapter discusses six transnational forces in Dutch education over the last 60 years. These forces were inspired for the larger part by a mix of elements with a societal background and by educational research studies: (1) New Public Management and the autonomy of schools’ governing bodies; (2) Striving for equity in education which led to fighting early stratification; (3) Designing education and specifically teaching based on evidence with a continuous debate on what counts as evidence; (4) Social constructivism as a source for inspiration of a new pedagogy in secondary education; (5) The gimmick of the knowledge society and its curricular implications; and (6) International benchmarking of student outcomes. For the influence of the role of evidence in education and the social constructivist turn in education, the developments in the Netherlands seem to follow the transnational forces quite well with little national counterforces. For New Public Management and school autonomy, fighting early tracking, and international benchmarking, we can see that national influences among others inspired by the constitution are competing with the transnational ones and at times even seem to be stronger. Before discussing these forces, we sketch the Dutch educational system in order to understand the context of these forces in Dutch education. Specifically, we focus on the role of the Dutch constitution, the inspectorate, and the final examinations in secondary education in guaranteeing the quality of education. This chapter is concluded with a short note on the influence of digitalization and commercialization.