The Institutionalization of Multicultural Education as a Global Policy Agenda

Abstract

This study examines the institutionalization of policies and curriculum standards for multicultural education across countries. We used two sources of cross-national data on education: the World Data on Education (WDE) compiled by the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (World data on education, 2007) and the data from the Curriculum Questionnaire of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007. WDE was used to gather country profiles regarding policies for multicultural education, and the data from the TIMSS 2007 Curriculum Questionnaire allowed us to look cross-nationally at multicultural curriculum standards for mathematics and science. The main findings of this study show that countries with more linkages to global civil society were significantly more likely to have national policies and curriculum standards for multicultural education. The significant effect of the linkages to global civil society persisted even after a range of other national-level characteristics were held constant. Such a persistent effect suggests the possibility that individual countries' adoption of multicultural education policies and related curriculum standards may not simply be a national functional response; it may also be an institutional embodiment of universalistic world models and principles that emphasize the ontological status of the individual as the primordial constituent of global civil society.