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The study presents a bibliometric network analysis of the two most recent schools reforms in Norway. Two research questions have been pursued: First, do the government-appointed expert commission use (in Green Papers) the same type of knowledge as 'evidence' for their reviews and recommendations as the Ministry of Education and Research (as reflected in the White Papers)? How has the use of 'evidence' changed over the two reform periods? Second, which body of knowledge amassed by the expert commission has the Ministry of Education and Science actually used for policy formulation? The network analysis shows (i) distinct changes in reference patterns over the two reform periods (e.g., average number of references more than doubled and references to international texts increased significantly), and (ii) an unexpectedly low usage of the 'evidence' presented by the expert commissions. The Ministry of Education and Research only draws on 9.5 percent of the references presented by the expert commissions. Strikingly, almost all of the adopted references are from a commissioned report that locally adapted and translated OECD's Definitions and Selections of Competencies project. The authors suggest 'studying up' and paying more attention to how scientific 'evidence' is actually used, translated, and edited at the political level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'governance' is one of the most widely applied concepts in education policy and research. Yet its meaning has changed over space and time both analytically and normatively. This history is a complicated one marked by both shifts and continuations in the politics of language and the development of unique intellectual histories and conceptual and empirical turns in the field of education. In this paper we systematically delineate the different meanings ascribed to governance within education with a focus on its polyvalence as a political project, empirical object and research analytic. Specifically, we highlight the various complementarities and tensions flowing from this rich and evolving language. We conclude by calling for more education researchers to reflect on this complicated history and attendant language as part of their framings and interpretations of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the tensions between education policy's attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, explained through Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes wide shut. My argument is that while the individual and society are both constituted through unavoidable division, antagonism and opacity, these notions are obscured through the operations of fantasy which holds out the promise of wholeness, harmony and redemption. In particular, education serves as a key site in which these fantasmatic ideals are promoted and pursued, a claim I substantiate via an analysis of the UK government's 2016 White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. Specifically, I read the White Paper in terms of five fantasies of: control; knowledge and reason; inclusion; productivity; and victimhood. My argument is that while fantasy is an inescapable element that inevitably structures what we take to be 'reality', education policy might strive to inhabit fantasy differently, thereby finding ways of escaping its current mode of seeing education with eyes wide shut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, education privatization has become a widespread phenomenon, affecting most education systems and giving place to a consistent increase in private school enrolment globally. However, far from being a monolithic phenomenon, privatization advances through a variety of context-sensitive policy processes that translate into multiple policy outcomes. This paper aims at understanding why and how education privatization unfolds in a broad variety of settings and, to this purpose, examines the different manifestations of education privatization on the light of Cultural Political Economy (CPE). The conceptual and analytical tools provided by CPE prove to be particularly well suited to explore such a multi-faceted and multi-scalar phenomenon. CPE has helped us to capture the intersect and tension between different drivers (global and local, material and ideational) of education privatization through the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. On the basis of a systematic literature review methodology, encompassing 227 research papers, the article identifies and systematizes six different paths towards education privatization – understood as groups of frequently associated circumstances, mechanisms and courses of action leading to privatization. Conceived as ideal types, these different paths ultimately allow for a richer understanding of education privatization and show that the international diffusion of education privatization norms and discourses is far from producing policy convergence at a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly mediatised policy processes influence practice in schools as education becomes a site of parental anxiety and choice exacerbated by standardised national assessment and ranking of schools in the media. This paper analyses the responses to media scrutiny of six principals whose schools’ national test results were reported in the Australian press following the release of the federal Labour Government’s MySchool website in 2010. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, the concept of cross-field effects, and associated research on mediatisation, the evidence suggests that the relationships between the press, education policy and schools are highly contested, and that principals have some agency in talking back regarding their school’s reported ‘performance’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education institutions of the post-war welfare state are often characterised as being lost, attacked, encroached upon and dismantled. In this paper, I contend it is important to avoid mobilising a memory of public educational pasts that do not account for their failings and inequalities. Turning to a historical engagement with the emergence of neoliberal politics, the paper explores how challenges and contestations surrounding ‘the public’ from multiple standpoints converged in the rise of neoliberalism. Recognition of these convergences and contestations, I suggest, assists to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between neoliberal reform and the welfare state, and thus of the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a just and equitable public education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Citizenship education in Australia is embedded throughout the school curriculum. Despite a coherent policy context for the inclusion of citizenship and civic education at all levels of schooling, the links between education and civic minded citizens are tenuous. This paper explores these connections by drawing on the views of participants in an international community service program between Western Australia and Tanzania. By situating the interview data in relation to the policy goals, the paper argues that the current policy framework 'sanitises' the political nature of modern citizenship. The results from this study demonstrate that students have little understanding of the connections between the civic, the social and the political realms of citizenship. These results suggest that the current policy context does not adequately prepare young people to position themselves in the political realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial literacy education as policy has gained international political momentum in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. This paper analyses how two policy narratives operated in Canada to promote and ultimately enact financial literacy education policy: the ‘crusade’ and the ‘chicken coop’. While the dominant and counter-narratives offer different perspectives, they both maintain financial literacy’s ‘sacred cow’ status. The application of narrative policy analysis (NPA) underscores how the politics of education policy are complex and cannot be explained by rational, positivist models that would privilege evidence over metaphor. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on NPA, and sheds light on how financial literacy education is likely to be shaped and legitimized more by the values and mobilization power of special-interest coalitions in favour of it through politics, than by evidence-based research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores changes to the educational policy-making arena through case study analysis of a Massachusetts law passed in 2012 that limits seniority-based job protections for public K-12 teachers. I use data from interviews with policy stakeholders, observations of public meetings, and policy artifacts to explore struggles over democratic engagement in what unfolded as a highly undemocratic policy development process. Using the policy cycle framework, I explore the ways that political pressure and political discourses shaped the policy development process through various contexts of political struggle. Ultimately, I argue that the case is indicative of what I am calling ‘neo-democratic’ decision-making, in which high-level interest group conflict leads to narrow forms of democratic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To varying degrees, education policy reforms around the world are driven by educational discourses relating to globalisation. At the same time, national and local histories, cultures and politics mediate the effects of globalisation discourses. This paper employs methods of analysis that draw on the concepts of ‘vernacular globalization’ and ‘policy archaeology’ in order to examine the ways in which the effects of globalisation on National Curriculum policy reform are mediated by conditions and priorities that are specific to national contexts. The enquiry focuses on three curriculum policy problems that are associated with the English school curriculum and have recently been identified as requiring reform: inappropriate curriculum knowledge, the skills deficit and the one-size-fits-all curriculum. The paper concludes by summarising the results of the analysis, identifying some curriculum issues arising from it and offering reflections on the methodological approach it has employed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical analysis of the Australian government’s education revolution policy as promulgated in the media release document, Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools. It seeks to problematize the government’s claim to marry quality and equity, via an analysis of the discursive strategies of the Australian government’s revolution talk. My analysis draws on the work of political theorists Jason Glynos and David Howarth and their synthesis of key ideas from Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory into a framework of explanatory ‘logics.’ This framework provides conceptual tools for conducting critical policy analysis, including: characterizing a discursive regime on a synchronic plane; accounting for its constitution, reproduction, and/or subversion on a diachronic plane; and explaining the ways in which it grips or seduces subjects at a nonrational level. Overall, the analysis of the education revolution in this paper demonstrates the value of this framework of explanatory logics for education policy analysis, in the process shedding some new light on the Australian government’s education revolution policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out the theoretical and methodological approach of a study of the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interest in relation to the Trust schools initiative in England. Drawing on the discourse theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe the paper argues that the politics of consensus associated with New Labour reconfigures the field of politics, closing down legitimate democratic space. Building on this approach and that of policy sociology the paper outlines how the researchers seeks to address the following questions – if the space for legitimate democratic debate is so severely constrained then how does a social democratic government deal with the kind of opposition that Labour faced in relation to Trust schools? How do governments persuade dissident citizens to support unpopular policies? How are citizens mobilised to support such policies? This also raises questions about how, in such a restricted political space, do those questioning or resisting such policies, engage in the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interests? The reconfiguration of the field of politics and what this means for the constitution of legitimate democratic debate is the object of study of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public schooling: (1) the commissioning of national assessment strategy policy advice, and (2) the award of contestable funding for the provision of support services to schools. It is argued that such practices advance neoliberal theories of schooling at the expense of the previous social democratic liberal settlement. The paper considers some possible consequences of increased privatisation of policy advice and service provision for understandings of and commitments to public schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explicates the elements of several policy instruments used in Connecticut, the political conditions under which they were chosen, and their intended targets and expected effects on teacher quality and student learning. The purpose of the paper is to explain how the Connecticut General Assembly (CGA) and the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) were able to implement and sustain a set of integrated policies related to teaching and learning over a 20-year period from 1985 to 2005. We argue that this occurred for three primary reasons. First, the state legislature combined changes in teacher certification requirements in the 1980s with significant increases in teacher salaries in order to build strong political support among teachers and teacher union leaders for the new requirements. Second, in the 1980s and 1990s, CGA and CSDE repeatedly combined policy instruments in ways that involved multiple stakeholders and strong elements of capacity-building, thereby increasing their likelihood of success. Third, several policies enacted in Connecticut in the 1990s were directly connected to and strongly reinforced each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the convergence of urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and posits a politics of place as a useful frame to both understand policy and undertake policy analyses. It reiterates calls for place to be taken seriously in education policy studies, but also proposes that it is equally important to strive for preciseness when using concepts such as space and place. The theoretical component of this paper concerns the intersection of relational notions of place and space with discursive concepts of the identity. The paper then applies these ideas to analyse urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and teases out possible understandings of how schooling may be implicated in a politics of the inner city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the politics of neo-liberal reform of education and training in the specific context of social partnerships. Social partnerships are hybrid social spaces formed when a range of interests/partners work together for mutual benefit. Partnerships are one of a series of hybridized social spaces which have been formed as a consequence of the trend to neo-liberal governance. The paper begins by situating the study of social partnerships in wider concerns about neo-liberal reform and politics. It reviews literature on social partnerships as a way of identifying the different approaches to the conceptualization of conflict or practical politics. These are role conflict, interest conflict, and regime conflict. It also draws on a series of empirical research projects on social partnerships in Australia which have identified persistent points of tension within partnership formation and maintenance. Drawing these conceptualizations and persistent points of tension together provides a framework which can guide systematic inquiry of social partnerships. The paper suggests that this framework facilitates research by naming different types of political action. It encourages a multi-dimensional analysis of partnership politics rather than presenting partnerships as either a celebratory or categorical expression of neo-liberal political rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so ‘drenched in the past,’ the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt and dysfunctional. This is an incomplete story. While national narratives and news media tend to downplay these features, there is no local consensus on the reforms. There is mistrust on both sides of the debate, and a growing opposition movement, which arises from decades of racial and political struggles, corrupt public officials, and previous experiences with the state exerting power over locally elected school boards, which disenfranchised African-Americans in New Orleans in particular. Although the new, post-Katrina educational system significantly altered political dynamics, it has not eradicated politics altogether. In this paper, I conduct a policy history of education reforms in New Orleans, connecting the historical and political context to current reform efforts. As researchers evaluate the effectiveness of the new reforms in terms of student achievement, it is important also to examine their impacts on communities and the democratic control of schools, as well as how they reproduce or break from historical patterns of political struggle and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools,in particular school governors– those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International tests of achievement narrowly measure specific academic subjects, but have larger educational policy implications. These tests come to summarize national education systems and are used in national and international discourse. However, students with disabilities are being entirely excluded from participation in the discourse of achievement. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, and Programme for International Student Assessment all actively exclude students with disabilities from being measured when the testing agencies set up ‘desired target populations’ and report out on testing participation. This exclusionary discourse establishes that students with disabilities do not belong in a culture of achievement and educational evaluation, which has an impact on policies concerning educational equity and maintains the oppression of low expectations. US policy requires that 95% of all students take achievement tests and be given reasonable accommodations. This paper concludes that international achievement tests should follow the same standard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article attempts to provide theoretical perspectives on the recent Conservative-led Coalition Government’s promotion of Teach First and related initiatives in England. In particular, we suggest the emergence of three ‘ideal’ types of teacher in the initial teacher training programmes outlined in the 2010 White Paper and related Conservative discourse: the ‘Elite Graduate’, the ‘High Flyer’ and the ‘Ex-Soldier’. These ‘ideals’, we argue, are dually performative: not only legitimating habitus proximate to Conservative ideological interests, but also awarding them authority over pupils and the educational ‘field’. We begin our discussion with an analysis of the amendments to school disciplinary practice proposed in April 2011 which appear to place new emphasis on teachers’ dispositions. Seen in the light of concomitant criticism of current teachers’ passivity, we suggest, these changes relate to our ‘ideals’ in two ways. Firstly, suggesting the need for a new cohort of teachers up to the challenge of authority. Secondly, enabling the ‘ideals’ to exercise their habitus in judgements over pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through the example of a Danish reform of educational plans in early childhood education, this paper analyses the emergence of a new pedagogical desire related to administrative educational reforms promoting accountability, visibility and documentation. Two arguments are made: first, it is argued that the changes in administrative practices during the last decade constitute a transformation, but also a reproduction of relations between knowledge and governing that goes back to the big expansion of the welfare state. Second, it is argued that these relations between knowledge and governing are not restricted to the administrative practices, but are part of education and its humanistic legacy as well. As such, the administrative demand of documentation becomes possible and recognisable through its reproductive elements. Elements that are constituted in a transformative conjunction in which the ‘professional nursery teacher’ is produced as a reflective daily researcher, who outlives her pedagogical desire as an analytical care for the optimisation of the ‘learning child’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper establishes and explains the important role of the Conservative Government of 1959–1964 in supporting the raising of the school leaving age in Britain from the age of 15 to 16. This was a significant and high-profile national issue that generated much educational, social and political debate around conflicting priorities during this period, and was emphasized in both the Crowther Report of 1959 and the Newsom Report of 1963. The Treasury was strongly opposed to the proposal due to its high financial cost. There was a large element of electoral opportunism involved in the Conservative Government’s approval of raising the school leaving age (ROSLA), announced in January 1964, but it also highlighted deeper complexities and reservations in Conservative attitudes to ROSLA as well as a long-term ambition to consolidate education as a Conservative issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Accreditation is fast becoming the dominant method of evaluation used in the European Higher Education Area. This paper traces the political process supporting the introduction of this method in Europe and identifies different theoretical understandings and practices which shed light on how we can interpret the spread and role of accreditation in Europe, before discussing current trends in European and US accreditation, which could pave the way for a joint research agenda. In the conclusion, some possible implications of current developments are briefly presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, a distinct political-educational imagination drives contemporary policy and praxis. This imagination finds root in the social governance models of British Third Way policy and can be considered social capitalist. Central to such politics is a view that social governance is capable of pursuing and achieving the social democratic ideals of equity and social justice, within the architecture of a globalising and competitive capitalist economy. In this paper, I analyse Australian federal and Victorian state education policies to argue that social capitalist politics has significant implications for the ways schools are being imagined and governed. Specifically, I argue that schools are re-imagined as 'learning communities' through which excellence and equity are seen to operate harmoniously amidst a marketising system of educational services. In doing so, I feature empirical data from an ethnographic project conducted in two socially disparate Victorian government secondary schools, to highlight myriad tensions and paradoxes that emerge when each school attempts to govern itself towards policy ideals. In conclusion, I argue that policy imaginations of schools as havens of excellence and equity are difficult to take seriously when infused into the architecture of an education system that is deeply stratified and structured to discriminate between individuals in line with performance hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of crises is a key analytical and political issue. This paper examines what is at stake in the processes and practices of construction, responding to the arguments made in Andrew Gamble's The spectres at the feast (2009). We suggest that there are three areas of critical concern: first, that too little attention has been given to the ways in which political and popular accounts of crisis have been (and are being) articulated; second, that analyses of the present conjuncture need to be attentive to the question of how many crises are folded into the present; and third, that studying crisis demands a critical reflection on both the politics and economy that are combined in political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One area where the financial crisis has shown the limitation of neo-liberal thinking is the area of educational reform. By studying the different ranges of national responses and by understanding the differing contexts for educational change in historical periods, we can begin to think differently about educational restructuring. In this paper I report on some of the findings from a four-year study of educational reforms in seven European countries undertaken for the European Commission. The countries covered are: England and Wales, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Sweden and Greece and the research was conducted from 2004 to 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek to contribute to political and policy analyses of globalisation by attending to global flows of emotions and by developing the concept global emoscapes. In so doing we build on Arjun Appadurai's theorisation of the disjunctive scapes of the global cultural economy. As a way of illustrating the benefits of our approach, we deploy it to analyse the scapes associated with the global financial crisis. We show how emoscapes are entangled with financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in the broader context of the global capitalist economy, particularly its most recent manifestation in the form of 'financialisation'. Our overall implication is that attention to emoscapes helps to enrich critical analyses of policy and politics. We hope that this paper inspires others to build on our approach to conduct research on education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of policy think tanks and more broadly the rise of 'policy networks' can be viewed as indicative of important global transformations in the nature of the state. That is, the emergence of new state modalities, with a shift away from government towards forms of polycentric governance, where policy is produced through multiple agencies and multiple sites of discourse generation. This paper addresses some particular aspects of this shift by focusing on a set of relationships and sites which have had some kind of influence upon the social and educational policies of UK New Labour governments. It has two main concerns. First, focusing on the generation and circulation of some of the key policy 'ideas' of New Labour, it maps out a related and overlapping set of policy networks which join-up government, think tanks and some individual interlockers, who 'straddle sectors and policy fields and settings'. Second, it highlights some of the main discursive elements that flow through these networks, in particular those of innovation and enterprise. They give particular emphasis on the role of 'social enterprise' and social entrepreneurs in the modernisation of public service provision and in providing solutions to intractable social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some particular aspects of the privatisation of public sector education, mapping and analysing the participation of education businesses in a whole range of public sector education services both in the UK and overseas. It addresses some of the types of privatisation(s) which are taking place 'of', 'in' and 'through' education and education policy, 'in' and 'through' the work of education businesses. This entails a traversal of some of the multi-level and multi-layered fields of policy: institutional, national and international. Such an approach is important in demonstrating the increasing diversity and reach of some of the education businesses and their different kinds of involvements with different institutions and sectors of education. It also makes it possible to set local rhetorics, such as 'partnership', within the context of corporate logics of expansion, diversification, integration and profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]