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Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations (IO's) deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of sovereignty. It follows that securing hegemony over a vision of the future is important strategic work for IOs, and a source of legitimacy derived from authority beyond procedure and performance. This is called promissory legitimacy. Yet what happens when this promised future arrives and is problematic? How does an IO creatively strategise this shortfall? In this paper, we identify five strategies deployed by the OECD in its "Future of Education and Skills 2030" programme aimed to re-negotiate a failed present and anticipate a new future. We also reflect on the ideational underpinnings of the OECD's new futures programme, and argue it is being mobilised to, on the one hand, get beyond the limitations of data governance, and on the other to help selectively shape a new cognitariat subjectivity engaged with immaterial labour in emerging post-industrial capitalism.

Comparative education is a field with a tradition that dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The field has come a long way since the times when travellers sought educational experiences that could be applied in their places of origin; it has expanded across the world, though the rhythm of knowledge production varies significantly from one region to the next. More recently, the increased attention to educational internationalisation has enlarged the pool of perspectives linked to the field. In this paper, we examine some of the more recent debates on comparative education to provide an analysis of the field within a specific context: Latin America. From a historical perspective, we analyse the continuity of, and ruptures between, the field on both global and regional fronts. We emphasise specific features of the region: how was comparison introduced, which were the main loci of production and circulation, who tends to use it at present and for what purpose. We focus on the circulation of themes and practices in three periods of time among Latin American countries. A particular form of academic institutionalisation--not driven by universities--is a unique feature of the region that differs from paradigmatic comparative education.

A critical and more nuanced understanding of the multifaceted relationship between projects of peacebuilding and educational provision is starting to develop. Drawing on an epistemological and ontological anchor of critical realism, and a methodology informed by the application of cultural political economy analysis and the strategic relational approach to understanding educational discourses, processes and outcomes, we illustrate how the "many faces" of education in conflict-affected situations can be better theorised and conceptually represented. In doing so, we link goals of peacebuilding to those of social justice, and reinvigorate the notion of education playing a transformative rather than a restorative role in conflict-affected contexts. Making such ideas concrete, we provide examples of how such an analytical framework can be employed to understand the multi-faceted relationship between education and projects of social transformation in conflict-affected environments across the globe.

This article analyses how Education for All policies were transferred to Brazil and Latin America by means of ambitious educational strategic plans such as the Plan for the Development of Education and the National Education Plans -- promoted by the Federal Government of Brazil, and the Latin American Educational Goals -- promoted by the Organisation of Ibero American States (i.e. the international commonwealth of countries which belonged to the old Hispanic and Portuguese empires). The analysis highlights how a complex web of educational policy transfer and borrowing was fashioned by means of concatenate environmental, cognitive and relational mechanisms.

Globalisation and convergence in educational policy worldwide has reinvigorated, while rendering more complex, the classic theme of educational transfer. Framed by this wider pursuit of new understandings of a changing transfer/context puzzle, this paper explores how an ethnographic "thick description" might complement and extend recent research. Specifically, it relates findings from extended ethnographic work on an attempt by a prominent Japanese university to "import" the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This rare case of explicit "borrowing" from a supranational space directly to the domestic institutional level, when approached in such a way, suggests new insights to help the field refine understandings of the processes, "shape-shifting", and "success" of international policy migration. (Contains 3 notes and 1 figure.)

Describes the levels at which young people in France can work for qualifications in technical fields, ranging from relatively straightforward trades to the highest levels of technology. Evaluates trends in vocational/technical and technological education in postwar France and discusses the relationship between national prosperity and high standards for technical education. (JHZ)

Uses Israel as an example to examine three variables--size, organizational mode, and political value system--and their effects on educational policy making and planning at a national level. Argues that in Israel's case small size, centralization, and democracy interact to create a new type of planning behavior termed the enlightenment approach. (JHZ)

This article discusses the problems and potentials of nonformal education in India by reviewing a number of booklets, surveys, speeches, and government documents which analyze directions of nonformal education over the past three decades. (KC)

Looks at the "schools map" of facility distribution used as a tool in French educational planning and at criticisms of this technique. (SJL)

The case of training in Kenya is explored in terms of the differences between the policy measures that would be necessary to increase the system's efficiency in response to the labor market and those concerned with improving its effectiveness in meeting social needs. (Author/SJL)

The field of educational planning and research in at least one socialist country, Hungary, does not conform to the popular stereotype of rigidity and conformity, nor is Hungarian education unaffected by changes elsewhere in the economy. (BRR)

Examines the potential of the World Bank scheme, outlined in its 1980 Education Sector Policy Paper, for helping Bangladesh achieve universal basic education. Considers such issues as formal vs. nonformal schooling, costs, and teacher training. Part of a theme issue on the World Bank Paper and Third World educational development. (SJL)

The author describes educational planning in France from about 1950 to present because he believes that a good many of the general theoretical problems of planning in France can scarcely be distinguished from the questions that are specific to Germany, which has reached an impasse in educational planning. (KC)

This essay applies a model to guide an analysis of goodness-of-fit between national and educational plans. The model is described through application to Nepal. In the process, information is collected on Nepal's 25 years of educational efforts and the reciprocal relationship to national development. (Author/KC)

This paper reviews and discusses some critical issues related to the use of questionnaire surveys in educational planning. Ten brief sections discuss survey objectives, coverage, questionnaire design, administration, validity, nonresponse, cost considerations, coding, statistical analysis, and interpretation. Five illustrative questionnaire skeletons addressed to different groups are appended. (Author/SJL)

An essential of educational planning in developing nations is ensuring self-allocation, the ability of new institutions to attract students by meeting their educational and occupational goals. This study surveyed primary school leavers' aspirations to examine the self-allocation potential of Nigeria's present attempt to vocationalize its lower educational system. (SJL)

We argue that the legitimacy of international organisations (IOs) as self-proclaimed representatives of humankind, which was unfounded from the outset, is waning. To substantiate that claim, we undertake a critical inquiry into the legitimacy of the promissory visions pursued by IOs in the field of education across three historical periods. The first traces the rationalistic educational planning and idealistic 'one world' projects of the post-World War II period. The second examines the era of globalisation, when the discourse that legitimised the educational visions of IOs shifted towards the promises of the 'global knowledge economy'. The third discusses the contemporary trend towards emergency governance and crisis narratives. While the narratives of progress shifted, a pattern that has emerged is the move towards globalism and uniformity. Drawing on insights from philosophy and historical studies of world-empire, we argue that the world-making experiments conducted by IOs were destined to be unsuccessful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 the 1990s, Singapore has firmly established its reputation in the global education policy space as one of the best education systems in the world. However, existing policy transfer literature on Singapore has been mainly interested in Singapore as a decontextualised, ahistorical case, rather than as a unique player in the global education policy sphere. Analysis of how Singapore's educational policies and lessons have been exported to other countries tends to focus on the mediating roles of international assessments and global policy actors like the OECD or McKinsey consultants. What has been much less clear is Singapore's own proactive branding and education export strategies. Guided by the Cultural Political Economy framework, this paper draws attention to how an enabling global education policy context with an insatiable appetite for fast policy lessons has aligned with Singapore's own initiatives to cultivate and export its brand of educational success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas about educational improvement are contextual and contested. This study proposes a critical and pragmatic framework to analyse systemic improvement, taking into account the paradoxes and limitations of quantitative sources. The study compared 83 subnational educational systems of three federal countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Based on a mixed methodology, we analysed the evolution of multiple educational indicators in 2004-2019. Then, we applied an expert's consultation process to select four cases of systemic improvement for further analysis: Ceará and Pernambuco in Brazil, Córdoba in Argentina, and Puebla in Mexico. Each case was studied in its context, with a multi-level analysis that links it to national educational policies. Instead of a series of policy recipes, we find that constructing a solid platform for education governance is the critical element shared by the studied cases where there is subnational systemic improvement over a long period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the educational strategies of Shanghai Chinese middle-class parents who intend to raise their children to be cosmopolitans. It is based on a 2-year interview study of a group of Chinese parents who send their children to accredited international bilingual schools in Shanghai. Drawing on the concept of ordinary cosmopolitanism, I identify the promotion of extra-curricular activities and frequent travel within China and internationally as two central family practices used to foster a cosmopolitan orientation to improve their children's future. Although cosmopolitanism has a strong appeal to them, my analysis challenges both their concept of cosmopolitan parenting and whether a meaningful cosmopolitan education can take place through parenting strategies. I argue that a transpositional understanding of Chinese middle-class cultural logic of parenting involves a new thinking about the risks, compromises and complex interactions between culture, class and education, as inherent in their parenting strategies for 'principled', 'fluid' and 'universal' cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the issue of language of instruction, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, and considers the persistent preference for monolingual learning environments in multilingual societies. The perception that the use of African languages in education interferes with the acquisition of a global language is shown to be incongruous with current research and theories about multilingual learning and translanguaging. Moreover, drawing from an empirical study in Tanzania, it is observed that the rigid separation of different languages not only has implications for effective language acquisition, but is also associated with negative social consequences for learners. This paper argues that the capability approach can contribute to improved understanding and analysis of these phenomena. In particular, it suggests that several issues relating to language of instruction can be usefully reframed as a problem of disconnected capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widespread education reform discourses attempting to alleviate high-stakes examination pressure and narrowly test-driven education systems in East Asia, none have been as systematic and drastic as the Free Year Program (FYP) recently implemented in South Korea. The FYP provides middle school students with a year-long reprieve from examinations during which they can pursue other activities outside of the rigid test-oriented curriculum, exploring their career paths, free from the pressures of taking the midterm and final exams. In this article, we explore the contradictions raised by the discourse promoting the FYP within the broader national 'Happiness Education' framework. The FYP frequently references foreign cases, and articulates a national imaginary caught in between multiple competing agendas: the cultivation of a modern neoliberal subject in pursuit of their own happiness versus a collective nationalistic agenda in pursuit of global competitiveness, and multiple competing Western-inspired and domestic education discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does 'student-centred' or 'learner-centred' education (SCE/LCE) mean? This study answers that question through a meta-analysis of 326 journal articles. An initial 10-aspect framework emerged from an inductive analysis of 10 key texts. This framework was subsequently condensed into 6 aspects: 'Active participation', 'Adapting to needs', 'Autonomy', 'Relevant skills', 'Power sharing' and 'Formative assessment'. The definitions used in each of the 326 texts were then coded deductively. The findings indicated that SCE/LCE has been defined inconsistently in the literature. 'Active participation' was the most mentioned aspect, whereas 'Power sharing' and 'Formative assessment' were the least mentioned. The author argues that ⁣a flexible 10 or 6-aspect framework for defining SCE/LCE is useful for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policy makers. Key limitations of the study are recognised, in particular the inherent subjectivity of the coding and categorisation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance to the new contexts while maintaining comparability across all PISA participants. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and Callon et al's theory of the three stages of translation of research, and based on detailed empirical data, this paper describes how the technical and the political, and the material and the semiotic, work together to make PISA 'fit' new contexts, while at the same time making the new contexts 'fit' PISA. This paper demonstrates how international comparisons demand profound changes in the ways countries come to know, represent, and act upon their education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies OECD's shifting agendas and approaches to education since inception and distinguishes three time periods. Each of these periods reflects shifting geopolitical and economic realities that shaped OECD's priorities and modes of operation. They also demonstrate the adaptive capacity and expansionist nature of OECD's education work as it successfully innovates, finds market niches and adds new dimensions to its datasets. These have culminated in its recent strategic initiatives, namely: PISA for Development and the Learning Framework 2030. The former aims to adapt PISA to fit into low- and middle-income countries and serve as the global learning metric; and the latter aims to incorporate non-cognitive competencies into its main tests. Together they are designed to expand and consolidate the Organisation's influence in the context of the SDGs. By adopting a historical perspective, we provide a critical understanding of OECD's shifting role in global education governance and its 'humanitarian turn. [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]

National higher education systems are undergoing profound changes, discussed in many but unrelated studies as outcomes of internationalisation dynamics and institutional isomorphism pressures. We propose to link these studies by emphasising the influence of both internationalisation and isomorphism on the formation of a global educational regime. Through a broad range of indicators, we describe the growth of the discursive, normative, and regulatory dimensions of such a global higher education regime. We find evidence of the following developments: (1) a rapidly growing network of international organisations focused on conferences, initiatives, and programmes supporting a global higher education agenda; (2) a striking increase in the number of international and national accreditation agencies, their mutual cross-national recognition as well as the number of universities that are nationally and internationally accredited; and lastly, (3) parallel increases in regional qualification frameworks and in the implementation of national qualification frameworks. These developments create integration pressures manifest in the mutual recognition of higher education degrees, for which a new generation of regional conventions has emerged worldwide in the past two decades. We discuss these processes and their implications for understanding 'national' higher education as well as the threats and limits to the burgeoning higher education regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]