Globalisation, Education Policy and Reform: Changing Schools: Quality Teachers for Outcome Optimization: A Review of School Input-Output Functionality

This chapter problematizes the assumption that resources are allocated to maximize education outcome and question what resources matter more to promote equality of education. In this context, given the multiple benefits of education, the primary goal of this chapter is to understand the school and non-school inputs that influence student progress in Utah amidst an increase in the education budget and teacher shortages. There are reasons that we believe that an effective approach to the equality of educational opportunity requires not only school input but also disruptive innovation. The latter is supported by a contextualized transfer of policies and practices based on adaptation to the local context. At the core of this argument is an understanding of quality education as the product of a community, rather than a product of a single policy. This distinction is necessary as the education production function approach ignores important diverse student backgrounds and refuses to admit the heterogeneity of societies, thus distorting the pivotal role of culture, and the positive relations of unobservable variables in the education production function.