Evidence and Expert Power in Finnish Education Policy Making: The National Core Curriculum Reform

Abstract

The extent to which education is nationally or internationally directed is a recurring debate in comparative education. The debate circles around the role of the nation state in the globalizing world. The authors address these questions by focusing on networks of knowledge and expertise in Finland’s national core curriculum reform (2014). The findings of the chapter demonstrate that education policy making is more complex than the simple dichotomy of local and global. “Global” has the power to produce evidence but the “local” possesses the ability to select the evidence and adjust it to meet the national needs. National experts play a central role in this process: it is particularly their ability to explicate international comparative data that was considered as “expertise” in the reform process.