Governance Indicators and Responsiveness to Population Decline: School Closures in Practice and Discourse in Saxony-Anhalt

Abstract

The subject of this analysis is the practice of school closures, since it constitutes a key response to demographic decline and is usually hotly disputed in regional discussions on demographic change. Our research is guided by two questions: How do political and administrative responses to demographic decline emerge? How is the practice of school closure publicly portrayed and discussed in the newspapers? We assume that in democratic welfare regimes, the spatial allocation of school infrastructures is mediated by the use of key administrative indicators allowing the calculation and public deliberation of questions related to education infrastructure policy. However, in transformation societies, a democratic political culture of “governing by numbers” only develops as a result of collective learning processes in which the participants acquire what we refer to as “democratic numeracy”. In the stratified German school system, social prestige is conferred unequally among the different school types, with the grammar school (Gymnasium) being the most prestigious school type. It is therefore likely that the elements of the school system are not affected equally by policy responses to demographic decline and public attention, which results in spatial inequalities. Empirically, the article follows a mixed-methods approach, whilst emphasising a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of school closures in the regional press of Saxony-Anhalt from 1990 to 2014. The results show that, in the transformation process, the relevance of indicator-based governance of the school infrastructure increases both in practice and in discourse. However, as the participants gain in democratic numeracy, the use of numbers becomes politicised. With respect to the pattern of school closures, grammar schools receive a disproportionately large share of public attention. This has a positive effect on their survival chances and diminishes differences in spatial distances between grammar schools and integrated secondary schools.

Quantification, Inequality, and the Contestation of School Closures in Philadelphia

“…When critical decision-making metrics are associated with underlying social and economic conditions, quantified policy regimes can perpetuate or worsen existing inequities under the guise of mechanical objectivity. Second, quantification and what Bartl and Sackmann (2016) term ''democratic numeracy'' can present a (limited) path to power for advocates. When the rules and the currency of the economy are explicit, constituents may be empowered to mount a defense that alters the course of governance.…”

“…. .whose schools will be closed?” In the intervening years, few studies have interrogated how schools are selected for closure; those that do investigate these processes highlight the role of data in managing closure decisions (Bartl and Sackmann 2016; Basu 2004; Bondi 1987; Burdick-Will et al 2013; Paino et al 2014). For example, several years before Philadelphia’s closures, Chicago used quantitative data to close underutilized and underperforming schools and in so doing also preferentially closed schools in disadvantaged and highly segregated neighborhoods (Burdick-Will et al 2013).…”

Governing Spatial Disparities in School Infrastructure by Numbers: Investments in Form, Tensions, New Compromises?

“…In other countries, such as Germany, testing has not been related to formal sanctions (yet). School closures have instead been driven by "school size policies" [12] as a response to demographically induced enrolment declines [13][14][15]. However, it has remained unclear how indicators of school size have acquired their role as key administrative indicators.…”

“…While planning procedures for school infrastructure certainly represent a less strict form of calculative apportionment than fiscal allocation rules, they display a similarly mechanical logic-especially when adaptations to demographic change approach proportionality. However, like any other form of quantification, calculative quantification might become subject to critique, which usually opens up situations for new decisions [13].…”

“…The analysis in this section will focus on West Germany after the Second World War because it is the institutional model of calculative quantification that prevailed after the German Reunification and has had significant, although ambivalent, consequences for the governance of spatial disparities in schooling by numbers [13][14][15]. Firstly, calculative school development planning was institutionalized relatively late compared to the actual developments in enrolment rates.…”