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In this paper, we report on our investigation of news coverage of accountability reform in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal during the implementation and assessment of New York's Race to the Top-inspired teacher evaluation system. In systemically analyzing how these prominent media outlets narrated this contentious moment in educational history, this study seeks to identify major narrative features pertinent to the ideological and representational dimensions of teachers in the era of consequential accountability. Specifically, we examine character prevalence, the characterization of prevalent characters, and the valuations ascribed to prevalent characters. This analysis, thus, aims to account for the mediatization of accountability reform. Our findings suggest that both periodicals constructed a one-dimensional conflict between education reformers and resisters of the newly implemented accountability policies while narrating those most affected by the policies as passive bystanders to the ideological conflict being waged by those with more power and influence. This reductionist narrative gives voice to reformers' audit-based notion of accountability while omitting the relational responsibility of educators – the form of accountability long associated with teachers' work. In accounting for ideological and representational features of journalists' narrative construction, we illuminate how prominent media outlets mediatize accountability policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comparative analysis of national curriculum reforms in Australia and the USA, set against the backdrop of global trends since the 1980s. The analysis is driven by an interest in the reconstitution of national policy spaces in global times, and draws particularly upon Stephen Carney’s notion ofglobal policy-scapesas a way of understanding the complex and disjunctive flows of transnational policy ideas and practices. The paper begins by arguing that reforms since the early 1980s have been driven by global panics about globalisation, equity and market competitiveness. These global influences have underpinned parallel reform attempts in each country, including the development of national goals in the late 1980s, failed attempts at national standards in the early 1990s and rejuvenated attempts towards national consistency in the 2000s. Building on this, we argue that despite shared global drivers and broad historical similarities, reforms in each country remain distinct in scope and form, due to several unique features that inform the national policy space of each country. These distinctive national policy spaces provide differentconditions of possibilityfor reform, reminding us that despite global commonalities, policy reforms are relational and locally negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is noted in school reform policy circles as the gold standard of academic excellence. While the presence of IB as a sought-after education vendor has grown in the past decade, the organization has attempted to shake off its image as an elite agency serving only private international schools with its longstanding liberal arts curriculum. As such its turn toward the public sector in the United States with a credential for vocational students appears perplexing and out of step with its product brand, but the newer Career Programme (CP) is marketed as meeting the needs of applied learners in secondary schools. This paper offers a case study of two schools in one US state that adopted the CP, generating IB school enrollments from among talented vocational students while elevating its ranking on the college and career readiness (CCR) score, an annual assessment of postsecondary success. The CCR policy reformers advocate curricular improvements so that all students receive the academic foundations and employability skills needed to thrive in the new economy. Yet the egalitarian discourse of CCR could not be attended to using the CP. In this case study only high-achieving students were advised to participate and enroll in the program. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on interviews with parents of children with significant disabilities, as well as administrators and special education consultants, between the early 1990s and 2008 in a mid-Atlantic US state, this paper examines the work of parental advocates as they translate special education policies to negotiate concessions for parents, bring issues into public debate, or attempt to incite other parents to activism. Advocates, we suggest, act as bridging agents in generating networks, connecting parents with others, articulating their knowledge with other parents' knowledge, and bringing additional communicative resources to encounters. The paper illuminates approaches to advocacy work and traces the tensions and shifts from adversarial/participatory constructions of advocacy work toward more professionalizing/meditational constructions as the articulations of local institutional arrangements and national disability law and politics evolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the traditions of critical race theory, the paper is presented as a chronicle - a narrative - featuring two invented characters with different histories and expertise. Together they explore the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative approaches to race equality in education. In societies that are structured in racial domination, such as the USA and the UK, quantitative approaches often encode particular assumptions about the nature of social processes and the generation of educational inequality that reflect a generally superficial understanding of racism. Statistical methods can obscure the material reality of racism and the more that statisticians manipulate their data, the more it is likely that majoritarian assumptions will be introduced as part of the fabric of the calculations themselves and the conclusions that are drawn. Focusing on the case of recent national data on the secondary education of minoritized children in England, the paper highlights statisticians' ability to define what counts as a 'real' inequality without public challenge or scrutiny; reflects on the dangers of statistical 'explanations' in the realm of public debate and policy outcomes; and questions quantitative assumptions about the intersectional relationships between different forms of oppression, including gender, class and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law what is arguably the most important piece of US educational legislation for the past 35 years. For the first time, Public Law 107–110 links high stakes testing with strict accountability measures designed to ensure that, at least in schools that receive government funding, no child is left behind. The appropriately named No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) links government funding to strict improvement policies for America's public schools. Much of what is undertaken in NCLB is praiseworthy, the Act is essentially equitable for it ensures that schools pay due regard to the progress of those sections of the school population who have traditionally done less well in school, in particular, students from economically disadvantaged homes, as well as those from ethnic minority backgrounds and those who have limited proficiency to speak English. However, this seemingly salutatory aspect of the Act is also the one that has raised the most objections. This paper describes the key features of this important piece of legislation before outlining why it is that a seemingly equitable Act has produced so much consternation in US education circles. Through an exploration of school level data for the state of New Jersey, the paper considers the extent to which these concerns have been justified during the early days of No Child Left Behind . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an empirical analysis of education policy in England that is informed by recent developments in US critical theory. In particular, I draw on ‘whiteness studies’ and the application of critical race theory (CRT). These perspectives offer a new and radical way of conceptualizing the role of racism in education. Although the US literature has paid little or no regard to issues outside North America, I argue that a similar understanding of racism (as a multifaceted, deeply embedded, often taken-for-granted aspect of power relations) lies at the heart of recent attempts to understand institutional racism in the UK. Having set out the conceptual terrain in the first half of the paper, I then apply this approach to recent changes in the English education system to reveal the central role accorded the defence (and extension) of race inequity. Finally, the paper touches on the question of racism and intentionality: although race inequity may not be a planned and deliberate goal of education policy neither is it accidental. The patterning of racial advantage and inequity is structured in domination and its continuation represents a form of tacit intentionality on the part of white powerholders and policy-makers. It is in this sense that education policy is an act of white supremacy. Following others in the CRT tradition, therefore, the paper’s analysis concludes that the most dangerous form of ‘white supremacy’ is not the obvious and extreme fascistic posturing of small neo-nazi groups, but rather the taken-for-granted routine privileging of white interests that goes unremarked in the political mainstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illuminates the tensions between the rhetoric and presumed rewards of an expanded conception of teachers' work and the work demands and strains introduced by such a conception. Based on data collected in the United States, this paper draws on multi-day, 24-hour time and task diaries recorded by case-study teachers, together with ethnographic interviews and observations, to illuminate the disjuncture between reform rhetoric and workplace demands. I use these data to assess the usefulness of existing theories of overwork as they may apply to teachers and teaching. This paper suggests that teacher overwork is, in part, a result of the expansion of teacher work roles. The argument unfolds in three parts. First, teachers' work roles have been expanded but structural supports for the expansion have been uneven. Second, the nature and extent of organizational support influences teacher experience of role expansion and, finally, teachers who embrace the expanded role conception strive to sustain it even in the absence of organizational supports. This results in overwork: here overwork is taken to mean working beyond the contractual day, week and year. Teachers' contracts specify their working day; when they work beyond this time without pay, then they are overworking. Current explanations of overwork do not adequately account for the case of teachers' overwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the research on crack-exposed children, their development and its implications for educational policy. It details the medical community's lack of consensus how, or if, crack-cocaine effects the cognitive development of children born pre-exposed to the drug. The article gives attention to some of the prevailing questions about crack-exposed children at school age and their educational needs. It addresses the question of whether crackexposed children are really doomed for failure, why educational policies and programmes designed specifically for crack children are necessary, and explores the implications for early intervention programmes and school-based programmes. At the heart of this paper lies a policy paradox. In the US one set of (health and social service) policies have targeted crack-exposed children and in so doing, have constructed the 'problem' as a public health issue. Other policies to address the 'crack-baby crisis' defined the 'problem' as a criminal issue, and thus punitive policies toward crack-using women became the focus of policy initiatives. This policy trajectory has thus masked and displaced the need for policy work in other areas; here, educational work. [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]

In this paper we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA's key role in developing and connecting personnel, political support, and financial backing for charter reform. Next we examine how the networks unfold at a local level by zooming in on a case study of New Orleans. By mapping out these connections, we hope to provide a foundation for further investigation of how this network affects policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the 'integral state' as the dialectical synthesis of coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as a strategy of governance. The author discusses three aspects of coercive state responses to the crisis in relation to education: (1) cannibalizing public education as a site of capital accumulation; (2) imposition of state austerity regimes and selective abandonment of education as a mechanism of social reproduction and legitimation in African-American communities that have become zones of disposability; and (3) governance by exclusion of African-American and Latino communities through school closings, state takeovers of elected governance bodies, and disenfranchisement. Systems of accountability are integral to this process as they make schools legible for the market, mark specific schools and school districts as pathological and in need of authoritarian governance, and justify minimalist schools in areas of urban disposability. This paper concludes with the potential of emergent resistance to dominant neoliberal education policy and argues that breaking with the framework of accountability and testing is critical to a counter-hegemonic alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper analyzes the contradictory location of the professional and managerial new middle class within the rising tension between old systems of the industrial capitalist model of education, epitomized by a reliance on high-stakes, standardized testing and the newer forms of production associated with the 'fast' capitalism of the global economy. The author argues that the professional and managerial new middle class is faced with a dilemma since they benefit from systems of high-stakes, standardized testing, yet require schools to also teach the types of skills and flexibility associated with knowledge economy. The analysis suggests that this dilemma represents the contradictory class location of the new middle class relative to both discursive and productive resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A description of a recent report issued by the US-based Alliance for Childhood indicates the main criticisms made of the use of ICT in primary education. These criticisms are considered and the arguments developed in the report are examined. The effect of the report's publication is also discussed, as is the media response in the US and beyond. As a partial answer to the report's claims regarding creativity and computers, two practitioners provide case study evidence of the ways in which ICT has been used to develop innovative classroom activities. The paper concludes with a call for enlightened discourse in this area rather than polemical stance-taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]