The Faultlines of Reductionist Fallacy in Global Educational Policy Discourse: The Heist of International Education Finance Policy and Public Investment in Teacher Education at Akrokeri College of Education in Ghana (Published)
Two fundamental assumptions have become dogma in reductionist educational policy analysis: that complex problems are solvable by dividing them into smaller, simpler, and more tractable units; and for this reason that public educational finance in global educational policy discourse is fallacious because it simply claims that the benefits of education are either illusory or epiphenomenal. Thus reductionist policies do not take into consideration the importance of the layered parts of the subjective local policy space, and hence fails to account adequately for thought, reason, and a full range of objects that are peculiar and proper to local conditions. Tracking the deep divide within the global policy analytic tradition, the paper brings a Ghanaian perspective to bear on reductionist educational policies of the World Bank which shows the reductionist educational finance agenda to be incapable of sustaining quality education for symptomatic reasons. This study was a cross sectional research that used the concurrent model of mixed method design, and specifically employed interviews, focus groups discussion and survey to collect data from students, tutors and the principal of Akrokeri College of Education. The study used a sample of 160 participants from a population of 1193. The paper takes a view that global educational policy discourse discounts local cultural and socioeconomic imperatives in policy prescriptions which results in a lot of politics and resistance because it compromises the quality of teacher education. These are insuperable limitations and dangers for any explanation that aspires to provide justification for the problems created by the fallacy of reductionism in educational policy analysis.