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This article introduces a collection of papers comprising the special issue, "Competing interests: Parents, Schools and Nation States." Drawing on the seven papers in the collection, and situating them in recent developments in the sociological field, the article discusses globally shifting relations between families, schools and the state across a range of nations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Australia, Germany, India, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA). The article proposes that the school is a crucial site for relations between family and state, and argues that a significant focus of the material and occupational investment of contemporary parents is the formal education of their children, re-shaping not only the relationship between parents and schools but also the nature of parenthood itself. In the contemporary context of global neoliberal education reform, parents are analysed both as local actors in schools and as subjects of national and international policy regimes.

This paper examines the outstanding performance of Shanghai, China on PISA 2009 and its effects on other national systems and within the global education policy field. The OECD's PISA is helping to create this field by constituting the globe as a commensurate space of school system performance. The effects of Shanghai's success are considered in three other national contexts: the USA, England and Australia. We combine (a) analysis of data from more than 30 research interviews with senior policy actors at the OECD, the IEA and within Australia and England; and (b) document analysis of policy speeches, commissioned research reports and media coverage from the three national contexts. Shanghai's performance in PISA 2009 produced a global "PISA-shock" that has repositioned this system as a significant new "reference society," shifting the global gaze in education from Finland to the "East" at the beginning of the so-called "Asian century."

In Western Australia, an action research project engaged White teachers and Aboriginal teacher aides in collaborative forums about the use of Aboriginal English in school and the development of two-way bi-dialectal teaching practices to support literacy acquisition among Aboriginal students. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal project participants describe the struggle to create cross-cultural understanding and the resulting improvements in classroom practices. (SV)

The article forecasts the possible educational trends and innovations in Australia by the 1980s. Restrictions to education spending will be more severe as Australians will prefer taxation relief than improved schooling and wide educational opportunity. Decrease in student participation rate beyond the compulsory years of teaching is also expected. Moreover, shift of school policies and governance control from central state bureaucracies to local communities which will result to the increase of articulate participants in educational debates will most likely happen in the said decade.