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The history of subjects is often told analysing notions of knowledge in historical reforms, policies, curricula, and textbooks. In this article, we analyse student papers from 1968, focusing on their responses to the topic 'Social distinctions and prejudices in Denmark'. The students present a number of concepts and categories of social differences and prejudices, depict a contemporary problem, refer to theoretical or categorical frameworks, provide a historical account, state bold claims and/or present conceptual definitions. Then, by giving different examples from their everyday life and by establishing some form of line or structure in their writings, they form an argument or narrative. They do this by using—we assume—information from their textbooks, from what have been discussed in teaching, in the public debate, and in the students' homes. The student papers not only passively reflect but are part of the ongoing constitution of the subjects and subject matter, during a period of tremendous educational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special section of the Journal of School Choice, which features the winners of the 2024 Patrick Wolf ISCRC Best Paper Prize. The International School Choice and Reform Conference (ISCRC-2024) took place in Madrid, Spain, and showcased the best research on school choice and reform from around the world. The article expresses gratitude to the conference planning committee and the Best Paper committee for their hard work. The three winning papers cover diverse topics, including the importance of a sense of belonging in educational decision-making, the historical significance of Father Virgil Blum in the school choice movement, and the philosophical underpinnings of school choice in US politics. The article emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to understand the complexities of school choice and educational reform. The authors invite readers to attend ISCRC-2025 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and provide contact information for further inquiries. [Extracted from the article]

South Korea implemented many-pronged educational reforms, notably to transition from heavy reliance on a high-stakes standardised test to more diversified assessment for university admissions. Nonetheless, this effort created another arena of competition towards meritocratic credentials—such as academic publications. The South Korean government, in 2014, prohibited high schools from documenting students' extracurricular accomplishments earned outside schools. This paper analyses the impacts of these reforms. We queried large-scale bibliographic databases with prestigious high schools' names in South Korea and retrieved publications where high school students were granted authorship between 2001 and 2021. We examine associations between school types, research topics, and the status of scholarly venues. We also show the number of papers from Korean high schoolers rose until the mid-2010s but declined after the 2014 intervention. Our findings suggest that diverse adaptive strategies can evolve as long as meritocratic ethos persists. We discuss further implications beyond the context of South Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, the emphasis on school reforms is increasing, and school leaders play a key role in realising reform initiatives for school development and change. Often, the formation of partnerships between researchers and practitioners for school improvement is promoted to facilitate professional development and enhance student learning. However, limited attention has been directed towards the underlying ideas, values and beliefs in government-initiated strategies for partnership in the policy context of educational reform. This paper examines how partnerships between schools and higher education institutions are conceptualised and legitimised in Norwegian reform policy documents. We analyse three government white papers, each coupled with an executive partnership strategy document. The analysis applies a discourse analytical approach to policy as text and transmission. Our findings show a shift in the official national discourse on partnerships in education, underscoring new tensions regarding the power to define focus areas in the local reform work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how superintendents and school principals enact national policy reform expectations and what characterises their local organisational arrangements. Furthermore, the paper investigates how superintendents and school principals deal with tensions as entrepreneurs. The study builds on qualitative interview data from two municipalities in Norway. Analytically, the study draws on institutional theory, more specifically, on entrepreneurship, which to a limited degree has been applied in educational and empirical studies. The superintendents and principals interviewed referred to various local arrangements and resources that were partly adapted and changed through reform work to better fit local needs. Such arrangements included intra and interorganisational dependency and cooperation with several actors and organisational resources. Superintendents and principals seemed to partly break away from existing patterns of interaction. The entrepreneurial work entailed dealing with several tensions emerging within and across institutional boundaries in the process of enacting national reform policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the widespread implementation of COVID-19 prevention and control measures during the pandemic, online classes have become a normal and indispensable part of college students' lives. Analysis of the factors affecting college students' behavioural intention towards online classes will help improve online class quality. This paper sets up a model to analyse the factors that may affect such intentions. The results show that social influence, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a significant positive effect on college students' behavioural intention, and enabling environment(i.e. the infeasibility of offline teaching due to the pandemic)has a significant negative effect on it. Gender and voluntariness, as moderator variables, also clearly influence behavioural intention. Based on pandemic prevention and control measures, along with education reform and modernisation, this paper offers valuable suggestions to online learning platform and education administrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates changes in the promissory visions articulated in education reforms around the world. We use structural topic modeling to inductively analyze the content of 9,268 reforms from 215 countries and territories during the period 1970–2018 using the World Education Reform Database. Our findings reveal a decline in traditional management-focused reforms and a rise in reforms related to data and information. We also find an expanding commitment to educational access and inclusion, but reforms framed explicitly in 'rights' language diminish. We argue that the rise of data-centric reforms and the retreat from rights-based approaches may both reflect and contribute to a broader erosion of the liberal world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dialogic teaching approach has been studied widely, both empirically and theoretically. However, despite four decades of research suggesting that dialogical interactions promote student learning, it has been very difficult to reflect this in practice. Teachers' professional development programmes oriented towards promoting dialogical pedagogies have been based on sociocultural approaches centred on teachers' reflective analysis of classroom practices. Studies show that reflecting on pedagogical practices is necessary but insufficient to promote the desired changes. Beyond reflection, initiatives centred on scaffolding the practice with dialogic discursive repertoires have seen more successful results. This suggests that centring on the practice seems to be fundamental to change. Nevertheless, the theoretical basis has not been elaborated further to understand why centring on the direct scaffolding of practice would promote teachers' learning and pedagogical practice transformation. In order to account for the available empirical evidence, drawing on the works of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, the aim of this paper is to elaborate on a dialogical theory of teacher learning. Using this theoretical approach, different theoretical views of learning, teacher professional development programmes and the main tensions therein are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Innovative Schools in Dali have received increasing coverage in Chinese social media and have also attracted middle-class parents from cities, as viable bottom-up educational initiatives. This paper explores the rationales for Chinese middle-class parents' choice of Innovative Schools in Dali. Analysis of data from online interviews with 33 parents from seven Innovative Schools in Dali revealed three types of narratives parents provided in explaining their alternative school choices: investors, escapees, and idealists. The narratives reflect different ways in which parents negotiate their relationship with mainstream education and Innovative Schools, how they define the "educational goods" they would like to pursue and how they deal with potential tensions within their practice. We then situate the phenomenon within the Chinese educational landscape and discuss its social implications in light of social reproduction theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Seldon (1916–2005) was a significant British neo-liberal economist in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1957 to 1988, as the "engine room" of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Seldon had been advocating the reform of "free" state education. He vigorously argued for education vouchers, by which each parent could be provided with purchasing power and school choice. From the mid-1960s, his ideas gradually attracted the attention of the Conservatives and contributed to the rise of the New Right and Thatcherism in the 1980s. Despite this, previous literature seldom explores Seldon's work in relation to education in greater depth. To fill the lacuna, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of Seldon's neo-liberal ideas about education and his approaches in promoting reform agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how to recognize and understand the education power, what indicators to characterize and monitor the education power, what ways to build education power. Based on the theory of evidence-based education research, this study uses the comprehensive integration method to carry out a systematic analysis. A strong country in education is an education that is based on local education practices and of international standards. It provides comprehensive support for national construction and human development, exerts an all-round influence on education around the world, and plays a leading role in global education. This paper constructs the ontology index, value index, and identity index from the perspectives of ontology, value theory and identity theory of the world, and forms the key index system of education power. To build a powerful country in education, we must deal with several relations, including the mutual promotion relations between education and politics, education and society, education and economy, education, and human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that power promised to England's teachers by the 2010 'Importance of Teaching' white paper has rather played out as a reformulation of methods of policymaking to more indirect modes of government control. I trace the growth of government control in English schools, promised front-line power in 2010 and a rise in non-statutory guidance after this point. Taking an actor–network theory approach to ethnographic data I then describe how a school takes up one such non-statutory educational initiative – 'Maths Mastery'. Focusing on early stages of the school's adoption of the initiative, I trace associations of actors which problematize existing practices for the teaching of maths and how the initiative is imbued with authority in relation to these. I argue that the ways in which certain actors – statutory education policy and government funding – associate with the 'optional' initiative reveals a 'back door' control of teacher agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses qualitative data from a survey of Higher Education students, who are also parents, to reveal changing attitudes towards, and perceptions of, education during the pandemic school closures in England. Thematic analysis reveals the stresses of 'homeschooling' and how parents reacted and adapted to these, including adjusting ideas around education. This adaptation mirrors the changing attitudes of parents found in pre-pandemic home education. The paper suggests that post pandemic education could be enriched by taking forward some of these ideas, particularly greater flexibility, personalisation and child autonomy in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational reform in China has brought about many Western educational approaches for teachers to consider as part of their pedagogy. An example of this is the theory of multiple intelligences (MI theory). This paper presents how a theory grounded in a Western context is locally reconceptualised by kindergarten teachers who grew up in a different context. A qualitative case study was selected to investigate seven kindergarten teachers' understandings of MI theory in China. Three methods were employed to gather data; semi-structured interviews, field observations and documentation. Evidence from the three sources were analysed using a thematic approach. This paper reports contextual factors that had an influence on the teachers' understandings of MI theory and thus its implementation, and argues that the introduction of new educational theories or approaches should be grounded in the local context in which the teaching will be embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the outcomes of instruction employing a pedagogy of discomfort (or disequilibrium)—a teaching style that embraces discomfort as a part of the learning process—in a teacher preparation program. Drawing on data from a case study, we present findings from our work involving teacher candidates in discussions about social injustices to encourage a deeper understanding of the origins of these societal issues and a greater awareness of how they impact PK-12 education. This paper identifies the minimization and validation of difference and privilege that emerged in the context of participants' responses, including themes that circulate around responsibility to change the existing system into one that is more equitable to all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a political-economic analysis of policy evaluation. We focus on Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) as a subset of policy evaluations and argue that they are used instrumentally by decision-makers in order to improve perceptions of reforms and help secure policy legacy. We theorize that this 'credibility premium' is more valuable for incumbents in politically polarized societies, which we empirically examine using two methods. First, we provide a series of vignettes of prominent randomized evaluations embedded by governments in policy roll-outs and a detailed case study of the Liberian government's decision to commission a third-party RCT evaluation of a proposed primary school privatization reform. Second, we have compiled a unique cross-country panel data set on RCTs in development policy since 1996, with which we demonstrate that RCTs are more likely to occur in polarized societies, and that the effect is amplified by the degree of political competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirteen years after the publication of the book Social Network Theory and Educational Change, what can we say about the evolution of research connecting social network theory and analysis with teacher professional development? In this evolution, we can witness a conceptual shift in the literature connecting teacher professional development with social network theory and analysis that is important to highlight and discuss. While before 2010 teacher networks were mostly perceived as a force enacting external initiatives for teacher professional development, this perspective evolved to a perception of teacher networks as a source of professional development in themselves. This paper discusses this conceptual evolution, its consequences for the literature, and implications for future research connecting teacher professional development with social network theory and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brian Simon (1915–2002), an influential Marxist historian and educationist in Britain, had been campaigning for comprehensive education from the late 1940s to the 1960s. In the early 1970s, followed by a rapid expansion of comprehensive schools since the issue of Circular 10/65, comprehensive education was under attack by the Conservative government and other conservatives. In the mid-late 70s, along with the conservatives and the New Right, left-wing intellectuals also undermined the public's confidence in comprehensive education. Faced with the crisis in comprehensive education, Simon continued to battle for it by shifting between different roles. Simon was not only involved in politics of education, but also dealt with ideological issues implicit in contemporary educational theories nationally and internationally which caused harm to comprehensive education. Despite this, very little research has focused on Simon's ideas and practice in relation to comprehensive education in the 1970s. Therefore, this paper aims to fill the lacuna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated the impacts of education on women's empowerment in Kenya using six waves of nationally-representative KDHS data. Our study utilizes the change in educational structure in 1985 as an instrument and finds that women under the new system enhanced their schooling by approximately two years. One year of education prolongs women's timing of the first birth, decreases female genital mutilation for the first daughter, reduces intimate partner violence, and improves women's household decision-making. Our findings are robust to several robustness checks. We examined different paths to explain these results, including information exposure, partner matching, and labor market engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the fall of the communist regime, Romania launched the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector in 1995. The reform was largely financed through a World Bank loan and closely followed the neo-liberal ideology promoted by Bank officials. It aimed to privatize and to implement private sector management principles in the public education sector. This paper argues that in order to introduce neo-liberal policy models, the Bank first created a structure of knowledge around the Romanian system of education, which diagnosed it as inefficient and underperforming. Specific representations of domestic institutions, bureaucratic processes, and actors were used to legitimate the forms of intervention proposed and the role of the Bank in internal governance. I argue further that the main stake of the project was reforming governance in education as new mechanisms for power distribution and money allocation were set in place. By manufacturing their role as impartial, apolitical "experts," and by ignoring the political nature of government, they created a niche in governance and imposed neo-liberal understandings in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite agriculture being the largest employer of young people, South Africa faces a youth unemployment crisis. The youth are increasingly disinterested in agriculture and often view it as a last resort in the absence of alternative employment opportunities. This paper explores strategies to change these negative perceptions and attract young people to agriculture. Drawing on twenty-two studies conducted over the past decade, national grade 12 statistics, University enrolments, yearbook reviews, and twenty job advertisements, I identify five key areas for intervention. First, the youth interested in agripreneurship need support to access financial and physical resources. They also need training offered jointly by tertiary institutions and the government. Second, agricultural education in primary and secondary schools will likely attract and retain youths to agriculture. Third, we need to reform the education system at all levels to ensure holistic student development opportunities, including the technical and soft skills required by agricultural sector employers. Fourth, our marketing strategies need reform; collaboration with the media is necessary to increase awareness and change youths' perceptions about agriculture and agricultural careers. Five, we need to strengthen the role of agricultural associations to bridge the gap between the agricultural sector and secondary and tertiary education institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to bring together two seemingly disparate conversations, design and environmental education, with the intent to offer an interesting, new, useful approach to developing educational responses to the climate and ecological crises engendered by the Capitalocene. Beginning with observations on the relevance of design to the creation of alternative futures, we outline results from a six-person year-long research project that led us to identify six principles for guiding eco-social-cultural change: all my relations, abundant time, mystery/unknowability, embeddedness/integration, ancient futures, and (re)creative dissonance. We situate this work within transformative orientations to design, which are shown to parallel critical threads in the environmental education literature. We then extend, rework, and reimagine the six principles by suggesting how they can serve as prompts to assist environmental educators to reexamine and move beyond problematic norms of the Capitalocene in their thinking and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, the Chilean Ministry of Education implemented the new School Admission System (SAS) designed with the goal of equalizing access to schools for the most disadvantaged families and reduce educational segregation. Yet it is not clear if the SAS is sensitive to socio-cultural minorities and their particular conditions. Hence, in this article we explore the school choice experiences of parents from three socio-cultural minorities under the new SAS: Mapuche – indigenous families, Latin American migrant parents, and parents with children with disabilities. Using an intersectional theoretical approach and a qualitative research design, we show that while in some cases the implementation of SAS impedes previous discriminatory processes, in others this new system alone has not yet overcome long-established and inherent educational inequalities in Chilean education. Besides, SAS has also resulted in new challenges in the school choice processes of these parents. Their experiences with the SAS express the intersection of different axis of inequality, according to the conditions and historicities of each group of families. Finally, we reflect on the challenges that the policy faces in regard to develop an educational policy that is fairer to all families, in the context of the unequal and marketized Chilean educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]