Book contents
- Politics and Knowledge Shaping Educational Reform
- Politics and Knowledge Shaping Educational Reform
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Radical Curriculum Change and the Politics of ‘Implementation’
- 3 Towards a Play-Based Pedagogy in Ghanaian Kindergarten Education
- 4 Implementing Fee-Free Education in Rwanda
- 5 Policy Implementation in a Sisyphean State
- 6 Reforming the School System
- 7 Educational Reform in Scotland
- 8 The Role of Textbooks in Improving Education in Portugal
- 9 Turning Social Capital into a Working Wage
- 10 High-Performance and Equity
- 11 Missing Opportunity?
- 12 Conclusion
- Index
- References
8 - The Role of Textbooks in Improving Education in Portugal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2025
- Politics and Knowledge Shaping Educational Reform
- Politics and Knowledge Shaping Educational Reform
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Radical Curriculum Change and the Politics of ‘Implementation’
- 3 Towards a Play-Based Pedagogy in Ghanaian Kindergarten Education
- 4 Implementing Fee-Free Education in Rwanda
- 5 Policy Implementation in a Sisyphean State
- 6 Reforming the School System
- 7 Educational Reform in Scotland
- 8 The Role of Textbooks in Improving Education in Portugal
- 9 Turning Social Capital into a Working Wage
- 10 High-Performance and Equity
- 11 Missing Opportunity?
- 12 Conclusion
- Index
- References
Summary
Portugal’s education progress from 2003 to 2015 has been praised as one of the most successful cases in OECD countries. This chapter describes the main factors of this evolution, highlighting policy measures taken on the aftermath of the 1995 TIMSS and 2000 PISA shocks. These policy measures include a more detailed curricular development, the improvement of standard assessment and the disclosure of schools’ results. These changes acted against the background of an experienced teacher body and counted with a discreet, but powerful factor: the reliance on quality textbooks. This chapter describes the recent evolution of textbooks’ role and their part in keeping both stability and improvement in the taught and assessed curriculum. It concludes with an account of how these apparently successful reforms were halted after years of bipartisan support.
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- Politics and Knowledge Shaping Educational ReformCase Studies from Around the Globe, pp. 115 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025