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The article presents the author's commentary on the theories of development underlying the Educational Sector Policy paper of the World Bank. The two main aims of education according to the paper are as follows: contribution of education to the achievement of social justice and role of education in economic development. The author criticizes the strategies derived from the new theories of development which link the achievement of economic development and social justice. According to him, it does not follow from the newer theories of development that equality will contribute to economic development. He also claims that the paper makes the methodological mistake of attempting to derive policies directly from descriptive social theory.

This paper takes inspiration from the Indigenous Fijian practice of 'curui' – weaving or patching together – as a metaphor to explore connections between climate justice, gender equality, and education in Fijian policies and practices. The paper argues that neither gender equality nor education can be 'silver bullets' for the huge challenges that the climate crisis raises, particularly for small island developing states (SIDS) such as Fiji that exist at the sharp end of the crisis. The paper contributes close analysis of Fijian national climate change policies and development plans from 2010, identifying the ways in which these policies frame and discuss the connections between climate, gender, and education, and asking whether these policies acknowledge traditional ecological knowledges, and the extent to which they are aligned with notions of justice. It argues that connected approaches to education, centred in Indigenous knowledges and ontologies, have thus far been insufficiently included in Fiji's policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses some changes in the World Bank's Educational Policy Paper. According to the author, the 1974 and 1980 Educational Sector papers of the World Bank show some major shifts of emphasis in its attitude towards educational development in less developed countries. Some changes include: emphasis on the internal functioning of educational institutions; support on software faculties such as economics and management and recognition of the difficulties associated with manpower forecasting. Lastly, the paper suggests the development of educational policies geared towards a balanced educational system, where all school levels and all kinds of curricula have their place.

Through a comparative analysis of policy texts from UN organisations and scholarly work since the 1990s this paper examines how mothers are portrayed in simplistic terms, as educated thus beneficial for their daughters' schooling, or deprived of education causing detriment to their daughters' future prospects. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with mothers from rural Pakistan, these global comparisons are brought into conversation with local narratives showing how mothers' aspirations facilitate daughters' educational opportunities. It is argued that mothers' subjectivities have a potential to inform global policy discourses for investigating the aspirational and transformational potential of mothers in contexts of material and social constraint. The paper proposes an informed approach to educational research and policy making which seeks to understand the processes surrounding mothers' support for their daughters' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, girls' education has been an increasingly high-profile concern in international development policy. At the same time, there has been a trend towards the greater production and reliance on quantitative data, indicators and targets in national and international education policy. Scholars have raised concerns about the rise of 'performance-based' approaches to accountability in education, and potential counterproductive effects of this for social justice and equality. However, few studies have explored how this trend plays out in practice within international organisations, particularly in relation to the heightened focus on girls' education. This paper explores the implications of the increasing reliance on quantitative measures for policy actors and draws on a set of interviews with key stakeholders working in organisations concerned with gender and education to explore their divergent understandings of accountability processes. The paper concludes by reflecting on the prospects for a transformative approach to measuring gender equality and girls' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

School segregation is both an enduring and growing area of research interest. School segregation is shaped by multiple and complex forces within educational ecosystems, including individual students and households, education jurisdictions, organisational (dis)incentives, policies, and larger societal characteristics and contexts. As a field of study, comparative education emphasises the complex interactions of historical and socio-cultural context with actors, social institutions and policy settings for explaining educational phenomena. With this foundation, comparative education is uniquely positioned to integrate studies of school segregation into a comprehensive and comparative framework for deepening our theoretical understanding of school segregation and its causes, solutions, and impacts on educational equity. This paper introduces the special issue on school segregation. In addition to providing an overview of the special issue, we present a theoretical framework that may be useful for informing future comparative studies and conclude with several possible future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Competence-based approaches (CBAs) in education have become an internationally important educational policy concept in recent decades. However, a substantial body of research has suggested that in order to understand and explain the evolution of CBAs, there is a need to analyse curriculum-making as a complex and multi-layered practice. To contribute to this research field, this paper makes use of Vivien Schmidt's concept of discursive-institutionalism (DI), which focuses on ideas and discourse. First, we compare ideas of competences as expressed in four influential CBA frameworks, and second, we exemplify how these ideas, with special reference to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, have been translated when re-contextualised within Swedish curriculum policy-making. The results show that when re-contextualised within national borders, transnational ideas of competences are reconfigured. In the case of Sweden, this process has led to a national interpretation of CBAs, discussed in this paper as 'hybrid competences.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Public-Private Partnerships' (PPPs) growing popularity within education policy circles, research on their effects yields contradictory results. The understanding of PPP effects is limited by the prevalence of generalist analyses that neglect to acknowledge the exceptional heterogeneity of the policy frameworks in which PPPs crystallize. Building on a scoping literature review, this paper aims at identifying patterns of effects of main PPP modalities on education (namely vouchers, charter schools and public subsidies for private schools) by considering the mediating role of policy-design variables. Our results show that PPP configurations oriented at the generation of market-like dynamics are frequently found to exacerbate school segregation and educational inequalities. Conversely, those PPP arrangements less conducive to market competition and those that follow an affirmative action rationale (such as targeted vouchers) are more likely to yield more positive effects on learning outcomes than other types of PPPs, without necessarily undermining equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines educational segregation in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro through the lens of a multifaceted centreperiphery relationship involving geographical, racial and historical dimensions. The paper first situates Brazilian racial inequalities historically, drawing on decolonial theory, before examining student enrolment patterns in Brazil's second-largest metropolis. Although Brazil is often held to be a racially integrated society, the analysis shows sharp racial and social divisions between a 'peripherally' oriented mass public school system, a 'centrally' oriented private sector, and selective public schools run by the federal government. The selective public sector is undergoing a period of transition, driven by affirmative action policies, and provoking tensions that are examined through the experiences of two politically-engaged teachers. The findings point to the importance of political mobilisation in effecting change and the need for further affirmative action policies, along with a revised funding model for public schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that country size can play a crucial role in shaping the type of gradual change observed in collective skill formation systems. Collectively governed dual-apprenticeship training has its base in the industrial and crafts sectors of the economy and builds on the decentralised cooperation of multiple public and private stakeholders. As a result, it tends to be strongly path dependent, which favours gradual over radical forms of change. However, in recent years, dual-apprenticeship training has been increasingly challenged by the rise of the knowledge and service economy and the growing popularity of academic forms of education. In this context, I compare policy responses in Switzerland and Germany, which represent one small and one large collective skill formation system, respectively. The historical-institutionalist analysis finds that the dominant trajectory of change is conversion in Switzerland but layering in Germany, with different implications for the future viability of collective skill formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, Amsterdam implemented a centralised primary school admissions policy, constraining school choice after a long history of highly autonomous schools and free parental choice which has resulted, in part, in the city's segregated schooling environment. Introduced out of concerns of inequality for parents and disorganisation by schools, this policy implemented a uniform choosing procedure and a distance-based priority mechanism. Drawing on interviews with school directors and municipal education officials, this paper examines how schools seek to maintain their legitimacy in a highly segregated school choice environment undergoing constrained change. The Amsterdam case serves as a unique example of local education officials confronting the well-documented negative effects of school choice through policies controlling school choice in an era of global school choice expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines competency-based educational policy-making in a global context. Specifically, it explores how the thinking around competency, spearheaded by international organisations and experts, has led to the development and deployment of a particular notion of global competency. Drawing on critical policy research, I examine three international policy events in which experts convened to discuss, debate, and co-construct ideas related to competencies in education. I argue that by structuring the assessment of knowledge and fixing meanings, the OECD, along with networks of experts, has created and diffused a particular social imaginary of a globally competent learner. Given the complexity and uncertainty of the world today, increasing the global and intercultural knowledge and awareness of the world's students is vitally important. Yet, with so much at stake, researchers must critically examine the processes through which educational futures are being imagined while at the same time, pursuing more equitable and inclusive education policy-making within and beyond the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years, Early Childhood Education (ECE) has emerged as a policy priority for many governments and international organisations. Yet while there has been much research about ECE, and despite some notable exceptions, comparative studies have figured less in ECE than in other sectors of education. This paper introduces the special issue on 'comparative studies in early childhood education'. It provides the rationale for this issue alongside a brief historical overview of the relationship between ECE and comparative education, explaining how the embodiment of diverse forms of comparative enquiry can reveal interplays between policy, politics and practice in the past, present, and future comparative studies of ECE. It concludes by introducing the contrast between comparative education as a 'science of solutions' and as a 'science of difference', concepts that frame the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue exploring parents' responses to neoliberal policy changes, especially shifting notions of risk and responsibility, this article provides a historical account of local and national policy initiatives in the contemporary United States that have increased risk and placed responsibility for this risk on the shoulders of parents (as well as educators). The opening section of the paper reviews major recent policy documents and initiatives in the United States, from the landmark 1983 report 'A Nation at Risk' to the current age of test-based accountability. In the following sections, the paper explores what two Chicago parents themselves had to say about risk and responsibility in public schooling. What, in their views, were the actual risks? What did they think their responsibilities were, as parents? What did they do in response to the shifting policyscape? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have witnessed a growing number of global campaigns on girls' and women's education, including major global policy initiatives such as the MDGs and the SDGs. While scholars have critically analysed the conceptualisations of gender, equality and development in such campaigns, and their significance for national level policy and practice, less has been written about why and how girls' education came to be such a high profile feature of international policy frameworks. This paper draws on perspectives from transnational social movement theory, which has been used by gender scholars to explore the activities and significance of non-governmental organisations for agenda-setting at the global level. In this paper these perspectives are applied to the field of global education policy, through an analysis of evidence from international conferences, data on aid flows and interviews with key policy actors, to explore the factors behind rise of the global agenda on gender equality in education. In doing so, it suggests that the current dominant framing around girls' education, access and quality, may be explained by the relatively weak involvement of non-governmental women's groups in proportion to the strong involvement of multilaterals, bilateral agencies, national governments and more recently, private sector organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces several research papers on international perspectives on education policy. Contribution of the papers to the theoretical development of international policy analysis; Overview of the studies.

The article comments on the Educational Sector Policy paper of the World Bank. The paper explores the educational problems in developing countries. The author compares it with the 1974 paper of the Bank, claiming that the present paper is more clear in terms of recognizing the complexity of the social and political forces at work on the educational scene in developing countries. However, he criticizes the paper's view of the purposes of education. He suggests that it lacks diachronic perspective on the processes of growth and adjustment in the past.

An introduction is presented which discusses several reports from the issue on topics related to education such as policy borrowing, citizenship education, and social change.

This paper examines educational policies toward indigenous minorities in Japan and Canada during the period of nation-building, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Both Japan and Canada first segregated indigenous children into separate educational institutions and then tried to assimilate them into mainstream society. Beneath these broad policy similarities, however, lie different rationales, with substantially different implications for education and social policy in diverse societies. In Japan, national integration was promoted through a cultural or ethnic rationale, a socially coherent approach that nonetheless allows little room for minorities. Canada approached national integration using a notion of citizenship that both allows considerable space for minorities but is challenged by unity. These two strategies can be seen in two polar models of the state - a civic-assimilationist approach of the 'French model' and an ethnocultural exclusionist model of the formation of the German state. The paper argues for a multicultural pluralist model including both civic and cultural/ethnic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to outline the educational reforms that have been taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) since the late 1990s and to explain the ideological and social dynamics shaping their implementation at the local level. The theoretical framework informing the analysis is in line with institutionalism, in particular three of its currently much-discussed variants. While sociological neo-institutionalism and historical institutionalism tend to focus on macro-level dynamics, discursive institutionalism rather focuses on actors' ideas and their interactions. Discursive institutionalism is useful in analysing the case of BiH— in particular, in discussing its system of community-based school governance because a diverse range of actors, including international agencies, national policymakers, school leaders, and community representatives, have been involved in enacting global norms and reforms. This paper then outlines how the current community-based school governance system has reached an institutional standoff wherein these diverse actors' motives, behaviours and meaning-making processes all intersect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the modern nation-state was an inherently centralising process. Education policy and the institutionalisation of mass public schooling played a key role in this process, facilitating industrialisation and the generation of mass loyalty toward the state. In almost all federal systems, however, education policy remained an exclusive jurisdiction of the sub-federal level, with important long-term implications. Adopting a most dissimilar case design by using two contrasting cases – Canada and Germany – this paper argues that boundary control has been an effective mechanism for sub-federal governments to consolidate and retain authority over education policy, despite recurring pressures for more harmonisation or even uniformity. Although both federations differ profoundly in terms of their institutional characteristics and macro-sociological contexts, boundary control strategies variously allowed sub-federal actors in both federations to thwart efforts of the federal level to assume a greater role in education policy over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important development in the post-apartheid South Africa was a departure from apartheid education through an outcomes-based curriculum reform. This resulted in several structural and policy tensions within the system. This paper highlights how these tensions have played themselves out and shows how government and stakeholders have addressed the challenges emanating from them. The paper argues that the tensions that dominated the post-apartheid curriculum reform have resulted in a significant paradigm shift focused on reclaiming knowledge and cognition in the classroom as expressed in the new revisionism in curriculum debate. From a policy point of view, it argues that the South African experience demonstrates how the pursuit of grand philosophies and ideals such as OBE and curriculum 2005 requires, at both macro and micro, systemic and institutional levels, generally and at the level of detail, a great deal of technical and political skills that cannot be achieved overnight. This calls for realism and pragmatism in school reform by focusing attention not only on what schools in society stand for but also on what they can realistically do and achieve, given their legacies and the particular circumstances in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholic schools in Scotland have been fully state-funded since the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act. Under this Act, 369 contemporary Catholic schools are able to retain their distinctive identity and religious education and the teachers have to be approved by the Catholic hierarchy. Similar to the position of other forms of state-funded and partially state-funded faith schools in Europe, the position of state-funded Catholic schools in Scotland has been contested. This paper initially locates the debate and discussion about Catholic schools in Scotland in the history and development of the wider faith schools debate in the UK, particularly England and Wales. The paper outlines the key themes in the debate on faith schooling in England and Wales identifying the similarities between the debate in Scotland and England and Wales and the distinctive features of the debate in Scotland. The paper will then focus on a critical examination and analysis of two key themes concerning state-funded Catholic schools in the Scottish context. The first theme is the debate over the continuation of government funding of Catholic schooling as it is effectively government funding of religious beliefs and practices for a particular Christian denomination. The second theme is more unique to Scotland and has some tenuous links to the debate on faith schools in Northern Ireland: the claims that Catholic schools are the root cause of sectarianism or contribute to sectarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical policy analysis and network ethnography of Teach for Bangladesh (TfB). We demonstrate that TfB is a localised version of a global teacher education policy - Teach for All/America (TfAll/A). Santos, Boaventura De Sousa [2002. The Processes of Globalisation. Translated by Sheena Caldmell. Eurozine: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais and Eurozine, August, 1-48] has written about the ways some national policies travel globally. He calls these ‘globalised localisms’. When they touch down and are taken up in another national context, he calls this a ‘localised globalism’. We see TfB as a ‘localised globalism’. This paper is focused on documenting and analysing the policy network that has enabled a globalised localism, TfAll/A, to be taken up as a localised globalism in Bangladesh through TfB. We see this as the emergence of network governance in a developing world primary schooling context. The analysis shows how pivotal to TfB is the boundary spanning networking of its founder, who connects the global to the local, the private to the public, and the provision of social services to philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japan Comparative Education Society (JCES) was founded in 1965 with its flagship Japanese-language journalHikakukyoikukenkyu(Comparative Education Research) first published in 1975. The organisation currently has around 1000 members, making it the second largest comparative education society in the world. Though JCES members have long engaged in methodological and theoretical debates, their insights are hardly acknowledged in the English-language literature. Drawing on a review of the Japanese-language literature and semi-structured interviews with 25 JCES members, this paper identifies a particular intellectual tradition within JCES, often referred to as the area-studies approach to comparative education. This approach, often practised by JCES researchers specialising in developing countries in Asia, has long constituted the mainstay of comparative education scholarship in Japan. This paper traces the formation of this intellectual tradition, and focuses on its complex relationship with the dominant paradigm of ‘paradigmatic’ English-language comparative education scholarship. The paper shows how ‘other’ comparative education societies – such as the JCES – can be looked to as a resource with which to ‘provincialise’ the way comparative education research is conceptualised in English-language academia, and to cross-culturalise the field of comparative education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a response to David Limond's exposition, “[An] historical culture … rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored”? British influence on Irish education since 1922', which appeared in Comparative Education, Vol. 46, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 449–462. Limond's overall thesis is that ‘a post-colonial overhang affects Irish policy-makers and bureaucrats in their educational policies and practices’. This paper contests three main aspects of Limond's exposition. First, in his analysis of the period 1831–1922, he fails to place sufficient emphasis on the extent to which the educational system was favoured by the Catholic Church, which operated in a manner which served not only its own interests, but also those of the middle classes of Irish Catholic farmers, merchants and business people. Secondly, he does not sufficiently indicate the extent to which the structure of Irish education from the early years of independence until the mid-1960s, and associated curriculum changes, were very different from the situation in Britain at the time. Thirdly, while he is correct in stating that, since the 1960s, Ireland has imported certain ideas on educational policy and practice from Britain, he neglects to demonstrate that there were also other sources, and that they were probably more dominant than the British ones. Hopefully, as a rejoinder, the paper will be read in a positive light by indicating how the historical study of Irish education within a comparative context is a neglected area of scholarship, and thus stimulate researchers to address the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Human capital and functionalist paradigms underpin the stance taken by most governments to education policy. These models have also had a profound effect upon the determination of education priorities in the poorest states and, indeed, upon aid policy. This paper argues, on the basis of evidence from the papers in this volume and from the wider research literature, that the outcomes of education for individuals and for society depend more upon national and local contexts, on history and on culture, than such models typically allow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines capacity development in education in fragile contexts. This is a current concern for donors and development partners, but there has been little work on the nexus between capacity, education and fragility. The paper examines the concept of fragility and the particular problems in education associated with fragile contexts. The key argument - and tension - is that the focus should be on restoring state functions, yet this may be in a context of severe difficulties for donor agencies or NGOs of aligning with the government. The paper outlines some of the choices to be made in deciding on a focus for capacity development in education, examining the levels for intervention (individual, organisational, cultural and political) and the different sectors (administration and education institutions). It provides examples of the different sorts of areas in capacity development in education arenas that would address specific features of fragility, but draws attention to the need for research and indicators of the different impact of these strategies. The paper concludes with an analysis of what appears to be necessary to ensure that capacity development efforts are sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on educational policy borrowing has mostly focused on explicit transfer processes, often highlighting how explicit reference to the international has served legitimatory purposes in the borrowing country. In contrast, this paper focuses on 'silent' borrowing, i.e. non-acknowledged processes of policy transfer. The paper argues that keeping processes of policy transfer 'silent' can also follow a logic of legitimation, depending on which patterns of legitimation are favoured in a political culture. Three propositions are argued in the paper, using the case of Sweden as an empirical example: (1) educational policy-making in Sweden has been heavily influenced by international discursive currents; this, however, has largely been left unacknowledged by policy-makers; (2) The educational research community has largely followed the official image of policy-making in its exclusive focus on the national context; and (3) Silent borrowing was so prevalent in Sweden for a long time because political culture was characterised by a powerful myth of rationality and national superiority, favouring strategies of legitimation other than explicit borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a comparative study of the growth of data and the changing governance of education in Europe. It looks at data and the 'making' of a European Education Policy Space, with a focus on 'policy brokers' in translating and mediating demands for data from the European Commission. It considers the ways in which such brokers use data production pressures from the Commission to justify policy directions in their national systems. The systems under consideration are Finland, Sweden, and England and Scotland. The paper focuses on the rise of Quality Assurance and Evaluation mechanisms and processes as providing the overarching rationale for data demands, both for accountability and performance improvement purposes. The theoretical resources that are drawn on to enable interpretation of the data are those that suggest a move from governing to governance and the use of comparison as a form of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portraying a localised educational system as part of broader global flows of policy ideas and practices emanating from multiple sources – an eduscape– the paper focuses on family practices shaped by global policy flows and the return impact of families on the translation of these policies into local school formations. Under scrutiny are the decentralising or devolutionary directives, linked so often to choice and competition, which took hold in Western jurisdictions in the 1980s, the influences of which are still strongly felt. The conceptual links spread to a mobile 'second modernity', implicating many a family in movement associated with choices they are obliged to make, and which are often correlated to family achievement and success. The observations reported here are framed conceptually by an interest in the synthesis of Beck's individualisation thesis and Bourdieusean practice approaches in order to portray and comprehend social being and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the political-economic analysis of globalisation and education as well as a culturalist approach to education policy borrowing, the paper analyses the role of local actors, specifically, national newspapers and the Ministry of Education, in mediating the potentially homogenising curricular policy pressure of globalisation exerted through the PISA league tables. Using the recent Japanese education policy debate as a case study, the author demonstrates how the Japanese media interpreted the PISA 2003 findings in a way that resonated with the specific cultural, political, and economic context of the time and how the Ministry used the findings to legitimise otherwise highly contentious policy measures. Questioning the conventional interpretation that the PISA 2003 shock caused the Ministry to redirect its controversial yutori (low pressure) curricular policy, the paper reconstitutes the Ministry as an active agent that capitalised on an external reference (PISA) to re-establish its political legitimacy in a time of increasing neo-liberal state-restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines interactions between the global and the local in the context of Japanese mainstream schooling, by focusing on the development of local government policies to manage diversity in schools. This paper reveals how local governments developed education policies in interaction with grassroots professional groups, activists and schools, and by selectively incorporating national policies. These local policies are multicultural education policies but differ in two significant ways. The first is their predominant concern with human rights education, leaving celebration of cultural diversity as a marginal consideration, and the other is the official use of the term ‘foreigners’ in the title of these policies; both of which reflect the pre‐existing local context. The paper demonstrates that new immigrants do not unilaterally impact on supposedly ethnically homogeneous Japanese classrooms, but that the pre‐existing local contexts (national, local and institutional) have mediated global forces in effecting changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates European Union (EU) education and training policies in the light of the evolving Lisbon agenda on improving the competitiveness of the EU. It examines the ways in which EU policies have developed over time, focusing on their legal basis, underlying principles, main forms of implementation and their impact on national education and training systems. The paper argues that, in the wake of the Lisbon agenda, the legal basis for EU activities has been substantially extended by intergovernmental agreements. The discourse on the concept of economic competitiveness has changed the formulation of new EU policies in education and training, exemplified by a strong emphasis on educational indicators, benchmarks and quality controls. This has resulted in a new wave of EU initiatives in the field, sometimes updating or recycling activities that had not been successful in the past. The slow progress regarding the Lisbon goals for education and training seems to indicate, however, that the impact of EU programmes and projects for educational provisions in the Member States remains limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an EU-funded project under the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Programme, with a particular emphasis on the Oxford-based part. Involving six European universities, the overarching investigation was concerned with the tensions between standardization and tradition in education. In Oxford the focus was on aspects of EU education and training policy in four Member States: the United Kingdom, German, Sweden, and France. The paper describes the research undertaken and its outcomes, using the project as an example of EU funding programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifelong learning has become a (still) increasingly popular slogan in the field of EU educational policy. Embedded in an international and historical account of the discourse on lifelong learning since the 1970s, this paper describes how lifelong learning has emerged as the central strategy in EU education and training policy, and provides a closer look at the EU’s underlying concept of lifelong learning and its objectives. Based on these illustrations, it provides some critical thoughts on the EU’s use of the term lifelong learning and its lifelong learning principles. Within this context, it calls for cautiousness: is lifelong learning just used as a powerful label, i.e. an elastic concept tailorable to any needs, or is it underpinned by a solid, comprehensive concept and strategy of lifelong learning? Following this line of argumentation, this paper also sets the EU’s lifelong learning policies in the broader light of the highly debated EU convergence policy in the field of education and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to shed light on the contexts and characteristics of principalship in developing countries, as well as to examine similarities and differences between principals in developed and developing countries. Twenty-seven papers constitute the data on which external influences on principalship, patterns of leadership styles and managerial aspects of the principal's role are analysed. Although there is no one portrait of school principalship in developing countries, some common features were revealed, such as limited autonomy, autocratic leadership style, summative evaluation, low degree of change initiation, and lack of instructional leadership functions. Theoretical implications and suggestions for educational policy and reforms are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education Management Organisations (EMOs), for-profit and non-profit management companies engaged in take-over and operation of public education, are becoming big business in the USA and the UK. It is estimated that in the US, EMOs were projected to generate up to $123 billion dollars in revenue in 2000. In the smaller UK system it is estimated that about #5 billion of services in public education could be contracted out to private organisations per annum. This paper examines the policy frameworks that have enabled EMOs to take-over and progressively contribute to the privatisation of public education in two national settings, the USA and England and Wales. The British scene is distinctive because government policies that have sought to expand the role of the private sector, via public-private partnerships, in the provision of public sector services and its strong accountability system, have provided opportunities for EMOs to be engaged in, or take-over, schools and educational administrative services formerly provided by LEAs. In the US, in the mid-1990s, EMOs were invited to take over school districts and specific schools. However, this practice has been succeeded by a new focus on taking over the management of charter schools. A large capital market that is able to finance enterprises involved in educational services supports the development of EMOs in the US. Our research findings, however, point to halting progress by EMOs in public education in the US. There have been well-publicised failures to deliver the promised better education at a lower cost and also well-documented failure to raise student performance levels in school and school districts. The paper concludes with reflections on the extent to which EMOs have taken forward privatisation and its implications for the governance of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Indonesia's experience with neo-liberal higher education reform. It argues that this agenda has encountered strong resistance from the dominant predatory political, military, and bureaucratic elements who occupy the state apparatus, their corporate clients, and popular forces, leading to continuation of the centralist and predatory system of higher education that was established under the New Order. The only areas in which neo-liberal reform has progressed have been those where the neo-liberal agenda has aligned well with that of popular forces and there has been little resistance from predatory elements. In presenting this argument, the paper illustrates the role of domestic configurations of power and interest in mediating global pressures for neo-liberal higher education reform. It accordingly suggests that Indonesia needs to construct a model of higher education that simultaneously fits with the reigning political settlement and produces better research and teaching outcomes than the present model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Standardised International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have gained prominence in global and national educational discussions. ILSAs claim to offer valuable insights for improving education systems, but their impact on educational policy varies and has become a contested arena. This article analyses how these assessments fed educational policymaking in six Latin American countries based on a review of policy documents; the article advances three theses on how ILSAs are used by policymakers: First, there is a tokenistic usage of ILSAs; second, ILSAs must be considered more as political devices bolstering national reputation rather than studies in the academic sense; third, ILSAs can serve as leverage tools that can be mobilised for broader political ends. The study shows that the promises, designs and reporting of ILSAs are not necessarily aligned, that participation in ILSAs has become a symbolic gesture, and that ILSAs' data are often cherry-picked to support pre-existing diagnoses and policy agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's commentary on the Educational Sector Policy paper of the World Bank regarding the criteria and methods of generating education cooperation projects for external funding. It refers to the World Bank's Education Policy Summary which states "A review of Bank experience suggests that methods of generating educational projects have not been adequate." The author claims that the paper fails to consider a number of special features of foreign assistance which apply to all sectors including education. Meanwhile, some of the criteria of generating education cooperation projects are as follows: it should be clearly requested by the recipient country and it should be carefully related to the recipient country's resources as well as to it needs.

Low completion rate in upper secondary education is seen as a big problem in the Nordic countries. School failure has shown to dramatically increase the risks for unemployment and labour market exclusion with severe consequences for both society and the young person. This paper analyses national policy measures to combat low upper secondary education completion rates in Norway and Sweden, often regarded as representing a social democratic welfare model and a universalistic transition regime. The analysis demonstrates that although this issue has received extensive political attention, the two countries display somewhat different policy designs. The Norwegian approach is proactive and targeted while the Swedish policy is more general and directed towards reforming organisational structures in upper-secondary education. In sum, our analysis demonstrates that national governance structures shape and influence policy design in the context of an increasingly diversified Nordic social democratic welfare state regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]