Norway

schools, the market, and the urban spaces themselves. A conclusion from an ethnographic study is that despite nationally defined principles mandating fairness, transparency, and integration, school choice policies are implemented on an uneven playing field, aggravating current patterns of segregation in education and even housing.95 Some scholars have identified school choice as a driving force behind increased school segregation,96, 97 while others implicate housing segregation, lowered educational standards, and weak pedagogical models as reasons for school segregation.98, 99, 100 Moreover, increased segregation with respect to student composition and academic outcomes across different schools has been found to be the main source of the declining educational equity.101

Norway

A social democratic, egalitarian public sector and a corporatist political economy have been strong, distinctive, and enduring characteristics of Norwegian education. However, the education sector in Norway has experienced a period of rapid and extensive implementation of New Public Management (NPM) reforms and post-NPM reforms in the past 15 years.102 Since 2005 the government has added new ideas of governance and implemented new methods of steering education in line with post-NPM reforms. New measures for input control have been adopted, and the negative effects of marketisation have to some degree been moderated by later educational reforms. From a Scandinavian perspective, Norwegian education has showed a reluctance and resistance to change, but at the beginning of the 2000s it experienced a period of rapid and extensive implementation of NPM reforms. An important question is how such changes influence the

95 Nihad Bunar, N., & Ambrose, A. (2016). Schools, choice and reputation: Local school markets and the distribution of symbolic capital in segregated cities. Research in Comparative & International

Education, 11(1), 34–51. 96 Gustafsson, J.-E., & Yang-Hansen, K. (2009). Resultatförändringar i svensk grundskola. Vad påverkar resultaten i svensk grundskola? Kunskapsöversikt om betydelsen av olika faktorer. [Changing results in the Swedish primary schools. What influences the results? Review of importance of different factors].

Stockholm: Skolverket. 97 Östh, J., Andersson, E., & Malmberg, B. (2012). School choice and increasing performance difference:

A counterfactual approach. Urban Studies 50(2), 407–425. 98 Böhlmark, A., & Lindahl, M. (2007). The impact of school choice on pupil achievement, segregation and costs: Swedish evidence. IZA Discussion Paper nr 2786. Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der

Arbeit (IZA). 99 Edmark, K., Frölich, M., & Wondratschek, V. (2014). Sweden’s school choice reform and equality of opportunity. Uppsala: IFAU 100 Lindbom, A. (Ed.). (2007). Friskolorna och framtiden – segregation, kostnader och effektivitet [Free schools and the future – Segregation, costs and efficiency]. Stockholm: Institutet för Framtidsstudier. 101 Hansen, L. Y., & Gustafsson, J.-E. (2019). Identifying the key source of deteriorating educational equity in Sweden between 1998 and 2014. International Journal of Educational Research, 93, 79–90. 102 Helgøy, I., & Homme, A. (2016). Educational reforms and marketization in Norway – A challenge to the tradition of the social democratic, inclusive school? Research in Comparative & International

Education, 11(1), 52–68.