William C. SmithThe University of Edinburgh | UoE · Moray House School of Education
William C. Smith
PhD
About
55
Publications
21,718
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666
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My research agenda is situated around the role education plays in international development with specific interests in education and health, national/international testing and other measures of teacher accountability, and the immigrant achievement gap.
Additional affiliations
November 2018 - August 2019
May 2016 - November 2018
August 2011 - December 2014
Education
August 2011 - December 2014
Field of study
- Educational Theory and Policy & Comparative International Education
Publications
Publications (55)
To ensure equal access to high quality education, the global expansion of universal basic education has included accountability measures in the form of academic tests. Presently the majority of countries participate in national testing; however, the past two decades have seen a substantial shift in test characteristics and aims. This article invest...
The global testing culture permeates all areas of education, re-conceptualizing the role of educational actors, the aims of education, and the accepted practices of education, as well as the general position of education in society. Characterized by census based standardized testing with links to high-stakes outcomes, the global testing culture can...
We analyse data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to reveal that immigrants in Canada and the United States make over $200 less per month than native-born workers. In the United States, immigrants disproportionately work in low-wage occupations, leading to large mean national differences between immigrants an...
Teachers, as frontline providers of education, are increasingly targets of accountability reforms. Such reforms often narrowly define 'teacher quality' around performative terms. Past research suggests holding teachers to account for student performance measures (i.e. test scores) damages their job satisfaction, including increasing stress and burn...
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an unprecedented shutdown of society. Among the various safety measures taken, much attention has been given to school closure as a non-pharmaceutical mitigation tool to curb the spread of the disease through ensuring “social” (physical) distancing. Nearly 1.725 billion children in over 95% of countries worldwide have...
This chapter examines the construction and early implementation of SDG 4 and asks if inclusion is indeed seen as essential for quality or if these concepts are treated independently. Often hailed as a milestone by advocates of inclusive education, as SDG 4 was put into practice, the big tent coalition and understanding of inclusion as quality appea...
Grade repetition is a common educational practice in schools in Ghana and Africa, yet it is under researched. Using a qualitative case study approach this paper draws from interviews with teachers and principals in select schools in Accra, Ghana, to better understand the factors and outcomes associated with grade repetition. Findings show how stude...
Propositional teacher knowledge is recognised as valuable in classroom teaching practice, yet little attention has been paid to it relative to practical knowledge. This mixed-methods study aimed to understand the relationship between teachers’ propositional knowledge and their classroom teaching practice in the collaborative school context using th...
Physical access to health facilities is an important factor in determining treatment seeking behaviour and has implications for targets within the Sustainable Development Goals, including the right to health. The increased availability of high-resolution land cover and road data from satellite imagery offers opportunities for fine-grained estimatio...
The present article investigates the construction of a ‘global’ teacher identity by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since the introduction of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in 2008. We critically examine TALIS-related conceptual frameworks, survey questionnaires and statistically driven scale...
This article provides an overview of the 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report, which looks at social, economic, and cultural mechanisms that discriminate against disadvantaged children, youth, and adults, keeping them out of education or marginalized in it. Countries are expanding their vision of inclusion in education to put diversity at the co...
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an unprecedented shutdown of society. Nearly 1.725 billion children across the globe have been affected as over 95% of countries closed schools as the virus spread in April 2020. Much attention has been given to school closures as non-pharmaceutical mitigation tools to stem the spread of the disease through ensuring s...
Accountability, a cornerstone of contemporary education policy, is increasingly characterized by external monitoring and an emphasis on outcomes or results. Largely absent in discussions of accountability are the voices of stakeholders who work, learn, and teach in schools and other educational institutions. This article highlights the critical imp...
Testing and Inclusive Schooling provides a comparative perspective on seemingly incompatible global agendas and efforts to include all children in the general school system, thus reducing exclusion. With an examination of the international testing culture and the politics of inclusion currently permeating national school reforms, this book raises a...
In 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) unanimously supported the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; UN, 2015). SDG 4 lays out the principles of education, aiming to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education’ around the world by 2030. The emphasis on quality is a marked shift from Millennium Development Goal 2, which foc...
The salutary effect of formal education on health-risk behaviors and mortality is extensively documented: ceteris paribus, greater educational attainment leads to healthier lives and longevity. Even though the epidemiological evidence has strongly indicated formal education as a leading “social vaccine,” there is intermittent reporting of counter-e...
Over the past 30 years teachers have been held increasingly accountable for the quality of education in their classroom. During this transition, the line between teacher appraisals, traditionally an instrument for continuous formative teacher feedback, and summative teacher evaluations has blurred. Student test scores, as an ‘objective’ measure, ar...
This chapter presents a theoretical and historical account of the OECD policy diffusion mechanisms, specifically addressing their influence on teacher policy. In order to present our argument, the chapter is divided in three sections. First, we present a historical description of how the Directorate of Education and Skills of the OECD has become a...
The practice of charging school fees has been consistently shown to be an ineffective means of poverty alleviation. The international community, including governments, donors, and civil society, have worked for the last two decades to abolish school fees, and the World Bank has been a key actor in driving these policy shifts. Nevertheless, the Worl...
Increasingly accountability in education has linked student test scores to teacher and
school evaluations. The underlying assumption behind this educator based
accountability is that the high stakes linked to student test scores will prompt
behavioral change, thus improving student learning and education quality. This study
conducts a cross policy...
Research about innovation adoption underplays the role of educational attainment in the individual
consumption of technology; consequently, past research underestimates the importance education plays
independent of wealth in diffusion, particularly as absolute levels of formal education rise worldwide. Using
data from the Programme for Internationa...
Education and health are both capital investments in national development,
often viewed as independent factors on a country’s labor force supply and
productivity. This study uses the 2010–2011 Third Integrated Household Survey in
Malawi to propose an Education-enhanced Health Human Capital (EHHC) model
where education influences labor force supply...
As national borders dissipate and technology allows different cultures and nationalities to communicate on a regular basis, more individuals are self-identifying as a global citizen. Using Social Network Analysis and multi-level modelling, this study explores factors associated with global citizen affinity and finds that education plays an importan...
Provided the shared post-soviet context and the rapidly declining school age population, this comparative study of teachers in Estonia, Georgia, and Latvia can shed light on alternative approaches to increased teacher satisfaction for countries in similar contexts that are unable to make across the board increases in teacher salary. The focus on hi...
The recognition that all children have the right to a quality education has pushed
education provision and quality assurance to the top of policy agendas. The use of test
scores for accountability purposes has risen worldwide, accompanied by a belief in the
market model (e.g. school choice) as a strong way to ensure and monitor quality
education. T...
The Right to Education Index (RTEI) is a global index designed to monitor national progress towards the realization of the right to education. It is not only an accountability mechanism for civil society, governments, and the international community to use to monitor commitments made around the right to education, but it is also a diagnostic tool t...
This report examines the nature and extent of support for teacher professionalism using the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013, a survey of teachers and principals in 34 countries and economies around the world. Teacher professionalism is defined as the knowledge, skills, and practices that teachers must have in order to be eff...
This chapter is part of a larger thematic report on teacher professionalism written for the OECD. The report was a collaborative effort with colleagues at FHI-360 (Carina Omoeva, Elizabeth Buckner, and Charles Gale) and the Education Policy Institute (Christine Van Keuren).
This article examines whether focusing primarily on public schooling can lead to more rapid achievement of universal basic education (UBE) than relying on a mixture of public and private
schooling. Through a structured, focused comparison, we find China’s greater emphasis on public
schooling has contributed to higher enrollment, attendance, graduat...
The past thirty years have seen a rapid expansion of testing, exposing students worldwide to tests that are now, more than ever, standardized and linked to high-stakes outcomes. The use of testing as a policy tool has been legitimized within international educational development to measure education quality in the vast majority of countries worldwi...
Student learning should be a central feature in any educational activity. Drawing from the social constructivist learning theory and the work of Vygotsky this chapter explores the type of assessment most likely to facilitate student learning by comparing classroom assessments to accountability assessments. The comparison makes it clear that classro...
The United States and Canada are destination countries for immigrants, attracting more than half
of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) immigrants and twothirds
of the OECD immigrants who have received tertiary education. Initial comparisons of
immigrant wages to their native peers using data the Program for the Interna...
As the number of immigrant students increase globally, an understanding of factors associated with their academic achievement is necessary to ensure their success in the destination country. Using the 2009 PISA and Rumbaut’s distinction of 1.25, 1.5, and 1.75 generation categories a two-level hierarchical linear model is used to explore the factors...
The ability of regression discontinuity (RD) designs to provide an unbiased treatment effect while overcoming the ethical concerns plagued by Random Control Trials (RCTs) make it a valuable and useful approach in education evaluation. RD is the only explicitly recognized quasi-experimental approach identified by the Institute of Education Statistic...
Parent trigger laws have gained momentum nationally under the premise that they will increase local authority by amplifying parental voice in the decision to turn around ‘failing’ schools. Using Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework we create two conceptual models of voice and evaluate the promise of voice in California, home of the only a...
The power of teacher unions in the U.S. has waned since the 2010 mid-term elections. The convergence of business conservatism and teacher accountability ideologies has led to an intense targeting of public teacher unions as a problem, both economically and educationally. Using the target audience framework of Schneider and Ingram (1993), I break do...
In 1998, Hurricane Mitch, the fourth strongest Atlantic Ocean hurricane in recorded history, destroyed much of Honduras. Hardest hit were more vulnerable populations of the rural hillside and the urban shanty towns. In the 20 years prior to Hurricane Mitch, a series of neoliberal policies shifted the tax burden to the poor and focused resources on...
Understanding of the effects of formal education on HIV/AIDS infection in South Saharan Africa (SSA) has been a complex task because consecutive waves of research offer different, seemingly contradictory
results and explanations of what exactly are the schooling effects on HIV/AIDS and the causal mechanisms driving those effects. This chapter conce...
Objective
While the international donor community has spent millions on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) prevention through educational programmes, the quality of information in educational curricula is rarely analyzed. This study analyzes the content of prevention programmes, focusing on informational ac...
This chapter analyzes the World Bank’s Education Strategy 2020 (WBES) to assess its likely impact on inequality. The chapter begins with a review of assessments of the Bank’s past education policies. It then compares four different theoretical perspectives on education policy: social class equalization, public goods, human capital, and neoliberalis...
The mechanism is which power is applied has evolved in the last twenty years with current implementation often done through soft power socialization. Containing a collective of impressionable students at the mercy of the state, the “top-down” model of power is perhaps seen best in the world of education. The current study investigates the effective...
Although per pupil spending in the U.S. has steadily increased since 1970, the current economic crisis will prevent this trend from continuing in the coming years. State budges have contracting, resulting in significant cuts to school district budgets. In this policy review, we investigate how the financial challenges and public evolutions in publi...
Education, for many, is seen as a global light out of the plight of poverty. Mantras like ‘knowledge is power’ and the ‘education gospel’ fuel the worlds push to increase education. With the expansion of globalization, education, especially higher education, is increasingly intertwined with neo-liberal practice. The result is the realization that i...
Collaborative policy report focusing on the state of girls' education globally. Primary responsibility was for chapter 9 "The role of the International Financial Institutions: economic orthodoxy and gender"
Recent destruction caused by the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti revealed the country's vulnerability to the world. With more aid flowing into Haiti than ever before, it is important to recognize the connection between aid, savings, and potential economic growth in order to affectively apply economic policy and transport Haiti to a less vulnerable...
Questions
Questions (2)
Increasingly educational systems are turning to market practices to improve efficiency. I was wondering what quantitative variables have been used to measure the market environment in which these practices (i.e. school choice) take place? There seems to be a decent amount on higher education but I am interested primarily in primary/secondary education.
See our take using Hirschman's exit, voice, and loyalty framework.
Projects
Project (1)
To estimate access to clinics, water sources and schools from villages in Uganda and explore how these accessibility estimates are correlated with multidimensional childhood poverty.
