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The study presents a bibliometric network analysis of the two most recent schools reforms in Norway. Two research questions have been pursued: First, do the government-appointed expert commission use (in Green Papers) the same type of knowledge as 'evidence' for their reviews and recommendations as the Ministry of Education and Research (as reflected in the White Papers)? How has the use of 'evidence' changed over the two reform periods? Second, which body of knowledge amassed by the expert commission has the Ministry of Education and Science actually used for policy formulation? The network analysis shows (i) distinct changes in reference patterns over the two reform periods (e.g., average number of references more than doubled and references to international texts increased significantly), and (ii) an unexpectedly low usage of the 'evidence' presented by the expert commissions. The Ministry of Education and Research only draws on 9.5 percent of the references presented by the expert commissions. Strikingly, almost all of the adopted references are from a commissioned report that locally adapted and translated OECD's Definitions and Selections of Competencies project. The authors suggest 'studying up' and paying more attention to how scientific 'evidence' is actually used, translated, and edited at the political level.

We investigate the sub-networks involved in education policy in Israel in recent years, using Mixed Methods Social Networks Analysis - drawn from combined analysis of qualitative and quantitative data. Our objective was to comprehensively explore the Israeli education policy network to deliver an understanding of its structure, actors, and relationships. Our research offers a descriptive, analytical, and interpretive account of the contemporary Israeli education policy sector, including the actors involved, central policy sub-networks and organizations, and their relationships. We analyze dependence relations within the sub-networks using Resource Dependency Theory and Policy Networks Typology. Our findings contribute to understanding the dynamics of Israeli education policy networks and their perceived influence on policy-making and enactment processes. To the international field of educational policy-related research, we introduce a novel category of policy network actors, previously unaddressed as a distinct type. We have termed this category 'Ethos networks' to characterize this group of actors and elaborate on its significance within the field. Additionally, we underline the importance of considering external societal and political factors in education policy-making.

This paper examines the tensions between education policy's attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, explained through Stanley Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut". My argument is that while the individual and society are both constituted through unavoidable division, antagonism and opacity, these notions are obscured through the operations of fantasy which holds out the promise of wholeness, harmony and redemption. In particular, education serves as a key site in which these fantasmatic ideals are promoted and pursued, a claim I substantiate via an analysis of the UK government's 2016 White Paper, "Educational Excellence Everywhere". Specifically, I read the White Paper in terms of five fantasies of: control; knowledge and reason; inclusion; productivity; and victimhood. My argument is that while fantasy is an inescapable element that inevitably structures what we take to be 'reality', education policy might strive to inhabit fantasy differently, thereby finding ways of escaping its current mode of seeing education with eyes wide shut.

This study examines the reference societies of Norway and Sweden embedded in their education policy documents. We examined 4,260 bibliographic references in 19 white papers and green papers prepared for the 2016/2020 renewal of the Knowledge Promotion Reform in Norway and the 2015/2018 Knowledge Achievement Reform in Sweden. In addition, we interviewed 10 policy experts who participated in the preparation of the analyzed policy documents. The results show that the reference societies overall reflect the existing knowledge production and dissemination mechanisms in education policy; however, they significantly differed between Norway and Sweden regarding whether and to what extent they reference knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Specifically, while Norway drew extensively on knowledge from its neighbors, particularly Sweden, Sweden seldom referenced knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Policy actors identified similarity, relevance, accessibility, reform contexts, and institutional arrangements as reasons for (not) referencing neighbors. This study calls for further consideration of the political, social, and cultural embeddedness of the 'socio-logic' to understand implicit reference societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rich literature has argued that so-called aspiration-raising policies tend to individualize structural conditions and thereby reproduce forms of inequality through young people's aspirations. This paper explores how aspiration-raising policy discourses are lived in ways that both accentuate but that might also contest their terms. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, we theorize aspiration as ongoing performances that can be altered and remade in affective scenes of interruption. We put our theorization to work in a longitudinal study that followed a young woman, Marie, throughout her upper secondary education. Whilst Marie's performances of aspiration predominantly chimed with such individualistic policy discourses, she would also describe moments where these performances were seemingly interrupted. These were moments where Marie vividly experienced concerns related to planetary crises. The analysis carefully unpacks these moments, and we argue that they bring Marie into contact with the political stakes in her life and lead her to search for alternative, more sustainable, and collective modalities of aspiration. Hence, supplementing previous studies that have shown how inequality is reproduced through aspirations, the paper contributes with new understandings of how alternative modalities of aspiration may emerge that potentially exceed structural limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of 'biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of 'biopolitics' into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers' approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a 'problematic subject'; secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction; and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontological politics has received increasing attention within education policy studies, particularly as a support for the notion of policy enactment. While policy enactment offers serious challenges to traditional approaches toward policy implementation, this paper takes up ontological politics as a concept that extends beyond implementation and holds consequences for policy formation as well. Analysing the different uses of evidence in recent policy documents from Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper argues that an ontological politics of evidence grounds policies in ways that define what can and cannot be enacted, what this paper terms policy enablement. The analyses illustrate an ontological politics of evidence that excludes non-experts in the first instance, and that sanitises the critical elements of enactment in the second. Both analyses highlight the ways policy enablement emerges from ontological politics and offers a supplement to policy enactment. Following these analyses, the paper offers some provisional thoughts on the relationship between enablement and enactment as an approach that attends to context as a constitutive element of policy-making.

Student participation at school is receiving heightened attention through international evidence connecting it to a range of benefits including student learning, engagement, citizenship and wellbeing, as well as to overall school improvement. Yet the notion of student participation remains an ambiguous concept, and one that challenges many deeply entrenched norms of traditional schooling.Informed by understandings of 'participation' linked to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this article takes the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) as a case study to explore how student participation is currently articulated in educational policy. It reports the findings of an analysis of 142 state and federal government policy-related documents, along with qualitative interview data from nine policy personnel. The findings suggest that students are conceptualised within these policies in contradictory ways, interpretations of participation are diverse yet frequently instrumentalist, and there is little conceptual coherence across the educational policy landscape in NSW in relation to 'student participation'. The findings are discussed in light of international interest around student participation. The analytical framework used in this analysis is proposed as a possible tool for critically examining the place and purpose of student participation at school, regardless of jurisdiction.

Promoting social mobility seems to be simple common sense. However, the solutions proposed in the UK under successive governments reflect a problematic individualism that is not about helping all of the poorest children, but about encouraging the poor to become as ruthless and competitive as the middle and upper classes. This article shows how the emphasis on competition is delivered in social mobility policy through the language and metaphors that are used. It examines how the problem of social mobility is represented through a critical discourse analysis of "Cracking the Code: How Schools Can Improve Social Mobility." This 2014 report, produced by the UK Government's Social Mobility Commission, uses metaphors, especially sporting metaphors, to engage the reader in its discourse. These include 'key steps' and 'marginal gains', 'walking the walk' and 'stepping up to the plate', being 'sharp-elbowed', and 'cracking the code' itself. These metaphors tell a story of competitiveness. The report exemplifies a wider climate in which we are now trying to 'crack' entrenched issues such as poverty, but still working within the neoliberal framework where the solution is yet more competition. Through metaphor, the report seeks to justify, disguise and normalise such competition, and make it seem common-sensical.

This paper presents a new heuristic device for the analysis of educational policy. Through an examination of the Evaluative State and the work of Brian Fay, the paper considers the way in which educational policy is subject to rational and linear forms of policy action and implementation. To counter this, positioning theory is deployed to consider the way in which we are produced both by discourse and the language of the "moment" in discursive acts. Using the work of Gee, the paper contends that policy texts and policy Discourse "themselves form policy, that is, they position policy-explanation and policy-framing within the bounds of the institution and so give policy form". Problematically, such mechanisms may succumb to the "death of subject" and accordingly I offer a third method by which we might conceive of education policy: the discursively produced position call. Subsequently, I propose a tri-partite theory for the examination and understanding of policy: policy-explaining, the production of policy texts; policy-framing, the ways in which all can be positioned by texts and Discourse to produce the meanings imbued upon policy; and, policy-forming, the impact of moment-by-moment conversational acts for their production of the policy text itself, that is, the ways in which policy is locally "formed" rather than locally "mediated."

Teach for Australia was announced by the Australian Government in 2008, at a corporate dinner sponsored by Swiss multinational investment bank UBS, hosting New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Conceptualising Teach for Australia as a polycentric policy network anchored in venture philanthropy, this paper examines how networks mobilise major government reform, drawing upon both market and state. As an organisation founded, staffed and registered by a major global consultancy firm (Boston Consultancy Group), the paper critiques and questions representation, divisibility and immutability. By drawing upon network ethnography, following people and policy, the paper traces the beginnings of Teach for Australia through inaugural founders, focusing upon co-affiliations. Mapping a heterarchical and polycentric network of non-state and state actors, it highlights indivisible flows of people, money and policy. Thus, this paper seeks to indicate how policy networks embedded in venture philanthropy mobilise policy, whilst being reliant upon formal bureaucracies. This is governance with government. Teach for Australia highlights the nexus between private and public, and fuses together critical connections between market and state, bolstering a major venture philanthropic network that chiefly impacts public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses performance-based research evaluation for the higher education sector in a postcolonial context through a Foucauldian lens. Using Hong Kong as an example, this paper examines the formulation of and receptions towards the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It is argued that Hong Kong academics, especially those working in the humanities and social sciences, associate the key concepts of 'world-leading' and 'internationally excellent' research in the RAE framework with Western knowledge that undermines local and regional research. They respond to RAE in four main ways: pragmatic compliance; refusal to conform to the demands of RAE; adoption of a dualistic strategy by publishing internationally and locally; and re-imagining of research assessment coupled with the promotion of indigenous knowledge. Two significant implications are highlighted in this article. First, the preservation of a research evaluation mechanism inherited from a colonial government perpetuates and entrenches external control and dominance in the former colony. Secondly, there is a need to re-construct the research appraisal apparatus as well as advance indigenous and hybrid knowledge in a postcolonial educational landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2021 the Chinese Government unexpectedly released what has become known colloquially as the 'Double-Reduction' policy. The policy decreed the reduction of homework pressure on students and greater control of private tutorial companies. In this paper, we set out to understand why the Chinese central government launched the 'Double-Reduction' policy in mid−2021 by using narratives to analyse the three most circulated explanations for the policy and its timing. We use data from a range of formal and informal policy texts. The three narratives, including one policy narrative dominant in the official discourse and two alternative ones, constructed the causal stories about the policy's rationale from multiple perspectives. The combination of multiple perspectives and a narrative approach helps reveal the policy event's complexity and lays a foundation for researchers interested in tracking the development trajectory of this new policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While public consultation is a signature process of democratic policy formulation, many governments manoeuvre to refract citizen's opinions or conduct it perfunctorily. Using the case of a medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong, this article unveils the strategies that the state and citizens employ to put their opinion through to the final policy text, during a public consultation process. Recent literature has identified the mechanisms through which individual actors or organisations contribute to broad policy agenda-setting or policy programme development. However, yet to be investigated is how they – sometimes with conflicting interests – collectively negotiate a policy with the state via public consultations. This paper investigates this very phenomenon, building on previous work conducted in the public policy field, analysing 51 government-generated documents through both thematic content analysis and critical discourse analysis. The paper uncovers four strategies adopted by administrations (non-commitment, case closure, disengagement for irrelevance, and placation) to evade citizens' equity-oriented demands and stakeholders' three counter strategies (mobilising other stakeholders into a coalition, reopening the case pointing out a new problem, and appealing by affirming relevance). The state's discrete refusals and stakeholders' conjoint reengagement tactics draw our attention to the complexity and subtlety involved in negotiation via public consultations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that materializes digitalized school leadership practice. The policy instrument is made available as a 'helpful tool' by a Swedish official education agency. The paper scrutinizes the policy knowledge process set to work within the instrument by the agency. Particularly, how the instrument may influence people to come to know and change schools, and how responsibility and risk of digitalization in schools seems to first be transferred to, and then between, people in schools. The paper is concluded by a discussion of how (a) three knowledge phases interact in the knowledge process of the instrument, (b) the technical – rather than social – solution that digitalized school leadership practice is found to be, and (c) implications for digitalization in schools as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon of interest to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds are often underrepresented in public educational programmes for the gifted and talented (G&T), a phenomenon that has concerned educators for the last two decades. Ethiopian-Israeli minority students (EIMS) are a good example of this phenomenon, as more than 95% of the vast resources allocated to promoting this minority population are directed to advancing underachieving students. To explain the roots of this policy, we analysed all reports presented to the Israeli parliament regarding EIMS during the years 2000-2012, as well as all studies that these reports were based on. A policy discourse analysis revealed that the public-political discourse concerning EIMS focuses almost entirely on the weaknesses and needs of this population. In addition, this discourse is led by policy networks of interest groups that are involved in promoting minority students. Analysis of the relative achievement levels of EIMS suggests that some students, and especially those in lower school grades, are suitable candidates for integration within G&T frameworks. We suggest that a change of the discourse concerning EIMS and emphasizing their strengths may lead to a change in policy, which will promote G&T students and reduce the 'stereotype threat' within this group.

This paper analyses the experiences of English primary school leaders who perform critical roles in interpreting government policy and navigating the landscape to design relationship and sex education (RSE) for their pupils. It considers schools as sites of political contestation and educators as policy actors, the voices of whom are often absent in the literature about RSE. Drawing on Peter Morriss' theory of power, the paper considers how primary school decision makers utilise their epistemic abilities to advance their policy preferences and how structures of authority and legitimacy energize and constrain them in their policy-making work. The findings suggest a paradox in power: while the national government has delegated decision-making about RSE to individual schools, it has simultaneously failed to uniformly equip schools to make appropriate policies about RSE and enabled parents to deny schools' credibility and authority as leaders in RSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although all young people in England are entitled to a full-time, state-funded education suitable to their needs, every year some are without a school place and must be found one through local fair access protocols. This paper uses the enactment of fair access protocols in one local authority to examine the impacts of policy shifts to increase the power of self-governing schools and reduce the role of local authorities in ensuring local educational inclusion. Drawing on observations of two fair access panel meetings and a school's preparations for these meetings, alongside Foucault's theorisation of relationships between local practices and wider policy conditions, I argue that particular tactics are produced through fair access practices, which prioritise procedural fairness to schools and serve to categorise perceived risky young people. This interpretation of fairness arises out of a policy landscape of tensions, which requires schools to balance individual performance priorities alongside collective duties for inclusive and equitable education, and turns what should be an inclusive policy into another facet of the increasingly nuanced exclusionary architecture of English education. The findings are internationally relevant given global support for self-governing schools which is creating new issues for the educational inclusion of marginalised populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the emergence of venture philanthropy in public schools in Australia, focusing on policy networks and policy mobility. It seeks to analyse how policy is mobilised and leveraged via networks, focusing on the initiative of a national education charity with deductible gift recipient status, and a national research education institute. By drawing on network ethnography, and following people, things, and money, the paper studies the restructuring of traditional government and its relationship to, and with, policy networks. Policy networks, as shown in this paper, are highly diverse in shape and form, consisting of powerful human actors, but also influential non-human actors that take on lateral scope including government reports, policy documents, and parliamentary legislation. The restructuring of the state apparatus is not a hollowing out of the state, but rather the state performs a central node within a policy network, challenging the notion that non-state actors supersede the role of the state. Policy networks represent highly valuable commodities and tend to be characterised by their reproductive values. These networks are tangibly reshaping the way money and commodities are circulated, offering a transactional currency and commodity within a marketplace, and reaching into public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) as a secondary school subject is affected by two policies, namely the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and Progress 8, which contribute to the measurement of performance in exams at age 16 (GCSEs). In this paper, I discuss the concept of performance measurement in schools and the purpose it purportedly serves, before outlining these two policies and considering how they contribute to the culture of performance measurement and a non-neutral discourse around 'standards'. I argue that the two policies act in tension in a game of tug of war with one another in such a way that the net positive effect on the subject of MFL is zero, but that the negative effect on students is substantial. I suggest that the policies act to impose middle-class notions of what it means to be educated on students, with a substantial negative effect on students from low socio-economic status backgrounds both in terms of their interest in the subject and their perceptions of their own value within the education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OECD's PISA is seen as a 'global yardstick' against which countries measure the quality of their education systems. In 2018 PISA included an assessment of global competence. This paper starts with the premise that in using a single global instrument to 'measure' this phenomenon, PISA claims standardisation over contextually rich data that can then inform policy and, arguably, in turn practice. Data for this study is based on tracking 'global competence' through documentary analysis, interviews, and then 'survey encounters' where PISA global competence questionnaire items were discussed by principals and teachers in three schools in Victoria, Australia. The analysis illustrates that schools and teachers variously educate for global competence according to the specific cultural context, policy and curriculum in ways that highlight the inadequacy of a global metric. With the growing attention to educating for global citizenship and the OECD's development of global measures, this investigation of localised understandings of global competence magnifies the 'situatedness' of knowledge (and therefore assessment practices). Questions are raised about what is ignored in metrics when such a contested concept is operationalised, and points to the lack of validity of this metric because it de-contextualises how global competence is understood by teachers and enacted in curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper picks up and elaborates on the conception of policy translators in schools – key actors in the enactment of policy. The qualitative data presented here highlight how it is often middle leaders doing high-profile policy work in schools, turning ideas into actions and bringing policy to life. As translators, they organise, manage, lead, plan, produce, inspire, persuade, and appease, and in doing so they translate policy into practice and make it a collective effort. At the same time, they are often overloaded and inundated. In focusing on middle leaders as policy translators, this research makes several important contributions to scholarship: empirical data is provided to support and expand on policy enactment theory, the limited research base on middle leadership is developed, and understandings of how school self-evaluation plays out in schools are strengthened. Thus, it is envisaged that this paper will not only be of interest and of use to researchers and policymakers concerned with policy, evaluation, and leadership but to practising teachers and school leaders attempting to make sense of their own experiences at the coalface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with the increasing discussions on juridification in education. Concerning theorizing on such processes, we examine the poor implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD (2008) in the school sector of Germany. The paper considers the reasons for this failed endeavor by analyzing the complex, multilevel relations between policy and law in different national and historical contexts. With this, aspects of juridification as a process in education policy can be illuminated. In this regard, we suggest crucial aspects regarding juridification in public education: a focus on regulative failures in juridification processes, juridification's contexts, the mandate for putting it into action, the allocation of resources, and finally, its objective and subjective rights dimensions, i.e. how an individual can claim rights within the machinery of public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops previous work in which we deployed a form of Foucauldian critique to clear a space in which it might be possible to think education differently. Here, in that space, we are hoping to 'get lost' in some unexplored spaces of possibility. We sketch some starting points, some 'lines of flight' for such thinking. To do this, we identify a concatenation of three crises and discuss briefly their inter-relationship. But the paper focuses primarily on education. The first of these crises, COVID, offers a moment, a space, in which we might think of ourselves, others, and the world differently. The second, climate, brings to bear a pressing urgency for change in the way that we think of our relation to the world in practical, political and epistemological ways. The third, education in relation to crises, is an opening within which some thinking might be undertaken about what it means to be educated, and in which the relation between education, community and sustainability, in a variety of senses, might be pursued. In the final sections, using concepts from Foucault, Olssen, Lewis and others, we seek to find inspiration from and an accommodation between Foucault's self-formation and commoning – a practice of collaborating and sharing to meet every day needs and achieve the well-being of individuals, communities, and environments – as a new way to think education beyond modern episteme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increasing move worldwide in education policy towards standardization in combination with a global trust in digital quantification and calculation. These policies cause frictions in early childhood education (ECE). Hence, this paper examines the way standards 'work' in ECE. The empirical study draws on the ideas of Actor-Network Theory to recount and examine the highly material processes of calculation and representation, in which standards become enacted and act in practice. The data was drawn from extensive interviews with early childhood teachers in the Netherlands as well as additional 'object interviews'. The analysis describes how a particular standard becomes enacted as an assemblage, which both invites and compels teachers and managers to engage in particular educational practices. Foregrounding standards and highlighting the way professionals work with, through or around them, enables educational professionals to (re)consider the doings of standards and creates a space to imagine how practices – and policies that shape these practices – might be assembled differently. We advance the argument that it is important for professionals to critically analyse their professional practices in light of increasing datafication. Enhancing sociomaterial sensibilities of teachers might support them to offset persuasive powers of sociomaterial policy assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that analyzing education policies through the lens of affect theory provides possibilities for understanding how particular concepts are associated with certain affective ideologies. To illustrate this, the paper analyzes the case of a recent publication by the Council of Europe titled Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. The analysis shows how various concepts related to 'democratic competences' are invested with affective meanings, cultural connotations and political rhetoric. The paper argues that democratic competences are effectively conflated with emotional competences, opening up an analysis of democratic education as a form of individual and psychological therapy. The conclusion addresses the implications of this argument for education policy research and practice. In particular, it highlights the importance of paying attention not only to the ways that affect shapes the production of policy text, but also how a policy seeks to invoke certain affective dispositions at the point of enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on teachers' practices amid a national curriculum 'implementation' project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers' everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case study. Two teachers at one school are selected for detailed attention because—despite their significant engagement, commitment, and work towards enacting the new curriculum—their innovations were not sustained. These cases provide a useful site of analysis of change as a practice, rather than a more common focus on change as an outcome. De Certeau's theory of everyday practice is used to discuss how work-for-change is an everyday feature of teacher practice in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage. This aspect of teachers' work in these settings is seldom acknowledged because successes are easily obscured by deficit discourses. Other factors contributing to the invisibility of teachers' work-for-change in these schools include the often-intangible nature of teachers' professional successes amid more formally visibilized failures, the ephemeral nature of everyday practice, and a workforce context characterised by teacher and leadership transience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'governance' is one of the most widely applied concepts in education policy and research. Yet its meaning has changed over space and time both analytically and normatively. This history is a complicated one marked by both shifts and continuations in the politics of language and the development of unique intellectual histories and conceptual and empirical turns in the field of education. In this paper we systematically delineate the different meanings ascribed to governance within education with a focus on its polyvalence as a political project, empirical object and research analytic. Specifically, we highlight the various complementarities and tensions flowing from this rich and evolving language. We conclude by calling for more education researchers to reflect on this complicated history and attendant language as part of their framings and interpretations of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon a long-term study of venture philanthropy and public schools in Australia, this paper focuses on Teach For Australia (TFA) as a major component of a venture philanthropic network, one that builds critical infrastructures and connections between non-government organisations and the state, creating a product pipeline into public schools. Utilising interviews with staff from Teach For Australia and venture philanthropic organisations, comprehensive and rigorous financial data, reviews, reports and website data, the analysis aims to identify the major philanthropic funders, individual actors and private foundations that leverage Teach For Australia, illustrating how this network develops for-profit pathways into public schools. In pushing a deficit framing of public schools, these networks incur privatisation effects, including flows of money, resources and key decision-making. They compromise the democratic principles upon which public schools are ideally based, in that the most disadvantaged public schools are opened up to 'entrepreneurial' and risk-taking corporate behaviour to test out teachers, products and services. By examining streams of revenue, partnerships and networks, we show how the purportedly non-profit Teach For Australia develops for-profit opportunities and business partnerships nested in corporate philanthropy, resulting in a privatisation effect on public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how teachers see policy and how the visibility of various aspects of policymaking are mediated by our school contexts. As a perspective from a K-12 classroom teacher conducting policy research with other classroom teachers, this paper also explores how teachers, in turn, might make our policy work visible to ourselves and the implications for teacher agency. Teachers in the study took part in a two-year participatory action research endeavour, joining school-based policy inquiry groups where we identified policies, mapped policymaking processes, and discussed the implications of our contexts. On one hand, these engagements highlight the central role a school's institutional narratives and professional culture play in constructing the ways we see policy. At the same time, they point to how our seeing exceeds and moves with and through such constraints. With reference to postcolonial interpretations of agency, I describe how as part of inquiry teachers constructed spaces for ambiguity and alternative accounts, and in doing so movement and difference, in policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks empirically at how the UK's policy of securitisation within education impacts on the meso-level space of cultural ethos and pedagogy within two majority non-white secondary schools and one majority non-white further education college. It does so primarily by documenting how British Values and Prevent policies enabled through the British Government's Counter-Terrorism and Security Act have impacted on institutional ethos both in terms of objective structures and staff subjectivities. It is argued here that the security-curriculum ensemble is a recognition of this meso-level space by central government and represents a development in moves made to restrict access and agency within this space, and even to circumscribe this space through symbolic violence. This paper concludes by urging school/college leaders to exercise their agency at the meso-level; to recognise this space as a place for democratisation and decolonisation as an equitable alternative to enforced cultural 'upgrading' and in(ex)clusion presented through securitisation policy that is in reality an instrument of symbolic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interventions instated to disrupt the destructive effects of the school-to-prison pipeline on students of color were repealed as a result of the US Education Department's 2018 Federal Commission on School Safety report. Using a critical policy and critical discourse framework, this paper examines how the language used in the report facilitated the process of repeal while concealing the insidious effects that the repeal could have on students of color and especially black students. Based on this analysis, the paper argues that education policy discourse is influenced by and supports the covert operation of white supremacist ideological structures that hinder the struggle for equity and justice in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targeted policy has been subsumed by a broader umbrella or meta-policy of inclusion, whilst at the same time, funding support for EAL/D learners is substantial. The devolution of EAL/D support to individual schools through autonomous targeted funding results in policy 'everywhere', distributed across broad portfolios dedicated to ensuring schools provide quality education services for all learners, but also 'nowhere', lacking systemic support and detail on how inclusion should be enacted for EAL/D and with no accountability placed on schools to demonstrate that they are addressing EAL/D learner needs. The co-location of EAL/D policy with a broad systemic policy of inclusion, the absence of systemic professional support, combined with devolution to school sites has had real effects on the policy in practice. The analysis demonstrates there is the potential opening of EAL/D provision to market forces at school sites, where the private sector can potentially sell commercial 'solutions' directly to schools, which have greater autonomy over one-line budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia – the National Quality Framework – has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework – generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp's framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare – poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents' childcare decision-making are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that best practice is a powerful form of governing practice in education policy whose distinctiveness remains conceptually neglected in comparison to the burgeoning literature on governing by numbers. Moreover, the paper identifies how the practice of generating best practice knowledge remains under-explored and under-conceptualised: we know surprisingly little about how best practices come into being in international policymaking contexts. The paper seeks to address these two gaps by examining the production of best practice in the European education policy space through the Open Method of Coordination. Drawing on in-depth observation, interview, and document data the paper uses political discourse theory to analyse the frontstage and backstage interactions involved in generating best practices for governing school systems in a Working Group coordinated by the European Commission. Analysis identifies three dominant logics which underpin the production of best practice and reveals how these logics work to confine to the backstage of meetings specific practices which threaten to call into question the credibility of best practice. The paper highlights how best practice works as a distinctive form of governing practice which deserves further consideration in debates relating to the role of knowledge in transnational education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates and elaborates on the fabrication of teachers' subjectivity who work in school contexts governed by neoliberal policies. Theoretically, the conceptual metaphor of bonsai pedagogy is proposed to understand teachers' processes of subjectivation enacted by neoliberal discourses, policies, and practices. The article aims to understand the relationship between the processes of (de/re)-professionalisation and the subjective experience of malaise, suffering, and sickness lived by teachers in the exercise of their work. Bonsai pedagogy is offered as a complementary category of analysis and interpretation of these processes that is more sensitive to teachers' subjectivity. The research is based on 35 narrative interviews with Chilean dissident schoolteachers who are members of teachers' political organisations. I analyse three strategies used by the bonsai pedagogy: i) controlling and saturating teachers' time; ii) managing and guiding teachers' practices; and iii) obstructing teachers' creativity. I discuss how the bonsai pedagogy reduces the capacity of teachers to unfold and construct their subjectivity in alternative ways. Since Chile has implemented neoliberal reforms in education longer than any other country, understanding how neoliberalism operates through and around Chilean teachers can contribute to furthering our knowledge of how teachers worldwide can resist and deal with neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a theoretical framework of policy assemblage, we analyse current primary mathematics teacher professional development in England, in the context of a transnational policy of mastery in mathematics influenced by East Asian practices. As well as the increased discourse of marketisation, and school and teacher autonomy, there has also been a paradoxical process of greater state influence over the content and form of professional learning. This paper maps the mathematics mastery market to show how marketisation and competition form a mirage that masks state-market assemblage. An analysis of these assemblages illuminates the state's role in fostering a market whilst also operating as an actor in this market, in this case in mastery professional development. Within the mastery market, tensions arise between the phenomena of replication and isomorphism and differentiation of 'offers' that develop affinity groups and networks. Thus, we extend previous descriptions of the hierarchy, markets, and networks, and the roles of state funded actors within teacher professional development by identifying the importance of multiplicity of logics, assemblage as a process of labour, and the dynamic nature of relationships and activity. Resources to support teacher professional learning are mobilised in competitive processes with apparent choice hiding state direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early post-apartheid policies envisaged a South African teacher who had autonomy to make professional judgements based on their school context and learners' needs. However, over the last decade, the state has increasingly monitored learner achievement and teachers' work. In this paper, we show how the professional development activities provided by the state for high school Life Sciences teachers focus primarily on measuring learner achievement and thus reflect organisational professionalism and managerial discourses which challenge the early post-apartheid vision of democratic professionalism. We present a case study of a cluster of Life Sciences teachers, generating data from interviews with eleven high school teachers and from observation of six professional development meetings. The findings show that the two main purposes of the activities in the cluster meetings are the improvement of learner results and the monitoring teachers' curriculum coverage and assessment practices. We argue that the discourse of performativity and managerial professionalism narrows the purpose of schooling, influences the nature of state-initiated professional development opportunities and also informs the way in which the state and teachers view their work. This contradicts the initial vision of the democratic state and provides insight into how neoliberal discourses have influenced education in a post-colonial country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teach For All (TFAll) is global network of programs based on Teach For America. Since 2007, TFAll has spread to more than 60 countries and had a considerable impact on educational policy across educational jurisdictions. Scant research, however, has examined 'shadow' programs based on this model but unaffiliated with TFAll, such as Teach For Taiwan (TFT). This paper engages in a critical policy analysis of TFT and examines both its emergence and (mis)alignment with educational policy. Our analysis first highlights the inspiration and support TFT has drawn from TFAll and its affiliate programs, despite its unofficial status. The paper then examines how TFT is aligned strategically with recent policy shifts toward deregulation in Taiwanese education. We also find that TFT is misaligned with key educational structures, including the national salary scale for teachers and teacher education system, resulting in a new category of transient teachers who are uniquely positioned in the teaching roles they assume but largely unable to continue teaching beyond TFT. We argue that more attention within education policy studies should focus on the impacts of (un)official TFAll programs – particularly given their disproportionate power and positioning to effect global educational change – and their (mis)alignments with national systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying current research on China's world-class university (WCU) policy approaches are analytical foci that privilege the agency of social actors and the problem-solving approach to policy analysis. Foucauldian poststructuralists draw our attention to policy document, which is seen as a discourse that organizes and administers society. Inspired by Foucault, Carol Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to Be?' approach (WPR) views policy document as a technology of governmentality. As proposed solutions to a problem, policy text produces the very problem that it seeks to address. Carol Bacchi draws our analytical attention to the rationalities, technologies of governing and subjectification effects created by particular problem representations in the WCU policy. Using WPR, this paper shows that WCU is represented as merely a technical, managerial and organizational problem. Such representations naturally reify WCU in material terms, such as research output, and in a temporal form of state planning. Genealogically, the root of WCU can be traced to the neoliberal movement of knowledge economy. However, Shanghai Ranking overturned this center-periphery landscape in disseminating the concept of WCU. China's one-party state means that WCU is pursued at the expense of sacrificing social sciences and subjecting academics and students to become 'red experts.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of performative culture in education and intensifying forms of test-based accountability have subjected teachers to a ubiquitous 'field of judgment' through which they are held to account. Within this context, professional development is consistently deployed as a key solution to stagnant or declining student outcomes. In this paper, we examine how accountability might be reimagined through one approach to professional development known as Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR). We draw on Foucault's notion of panopticism and Ball's influential writings on performativity to analyse interviews with 21 educators from 14 schools in New South Wales, Australia, conducted during a 2014–2015 randomised controlled trial. Participants highlighted the pervasiveness of testing and test results in shaping their experience of teaching in a system of perpetual surveillance where numbers bite deep into practice. By contrast, participation in QTR afforded teachers rare spaces of freedom within the structure of performativity to collaboratively focus on pedagogy. We argue meaningful professional development can alter the field of judgment and enable teachers to reclaim accountability on their own terms, while maintaining a clear focus on student outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing emphasis in education policy on 'what works for whom and in what circumstances', there is still considerable attention to decontextualised 'best practices' that emerge from cross-country comparisons of student achievement. Also, while operational and even political aspects of context are increasingly incorporated into policy research, there is relatively little attention to the relationship between sociocultural context and education policy. In this paper, I explore the extent to which national sociocultural context influences the relationship between one aspect of policy – teacher accountability – and student outcomes. I do so by using multilevel modelling to analyse international survey data on education (from PISA 2012, PISA 2015, and TIMSS 2015) matched at the country level with survey data on culture (from the World Values Survey and Hofstede's IBM study). I find that one of the sociocultural constructs significantly and consistently moderates the relationship between teacher accountability and student outcomes, suggesting that some teacher accountability approaches may be beneficial in certain sociocultural contexts but detrimental in others. This finding implies a need for caution in generating universal policy prescriptions from international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS. It also strengthens the case for viewing teacher accountability as a socioculturally embedded process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread neoliberal approaches to education consider schools increasingly accountable for self-management and 'client' recruitment, encapsulating economic ideologies that assume privatisation is essential for social progress. With an ever-shifting landscape of market-driven policies and the increasing growth of private education settings, more research is needed to cast light on emerging or under-researched aspects of autonomous schools. Located within a U.S. state that has strict constraints on tax subsidies for religious K-12 education, this paper investigates how an extensive form of decentralisation corresponds with schools' discipline and ethical environment. It analyses teacher interviews and web documents from faith-based, autonomous schools in a state that has devolved power and authority for decision-making to parents and other independent 'agents', having a distanced relationship with its nonstate 'actors'. The paper follows Foucault's use of the metaphor of the panopticon and adopts his power analysis to examine the nature of parental control and its influence on disciplinary and ethical practices. Evidence suggests that these autonomous schools are driven by a 'mini-public' ideology that constrains educators' autonomy and generates particular disciplinary norms; entangling ethical, educational, and social ramifications, including teacher resistance and teacher demoralisation. Implications for policy are discussed in this context of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical policy analyses have hitherto largely focused on how formal institutions and agents (such as schools and ministries) formulate and enact policy. Less considered is the role and perspectives of families in mediating education policy. This paper discusses the importance of viewing families as not only policy subjects, but policy actors who play important roles in negotiating education policy reform. In the Singapore context, as in many contexts, there has been a growing policy emphasis on developing higher-order critical and innovative thinking to equip young people for the global knowledge economy. However, it is at the socioeconomic margins of society that policy ideals tend not to map out as policymakers expect. We draw on in-depth interviews with low-income families - analysed using a governmentality perspective - to understand how families navigate Singapore's policy landscape, particularly its growing emphasis on higher-order competencies within a neoliberal, performative, high-stakes education system. The paper concludes by elaborating on equity implications arising from this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With some of the propositions from the literature on 'policy enactments' as a backdrop, this paper addresses the circulation of a research policy innovation and its effects on the knowledge territory of an unlikely profession. Specifically, I show how the Research Excellence Frameworks' impact policy in the UK was an object first managed by policymakers but later released as an object of concern for professional academics, including philosophers. I follow 'impact' through texts, events and testimonies about its doings with a special interest in its creation, its polemical encounter with philosophers, its management and issues about its definition and the assessment criteria used and experienced by philosophers. I conclude with some remarks on the effects that the circulation and writing of impact case studies had on producing a social valorisation and attachment to impact, even amongst philosophers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, since the launch of its flagship study the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has become a behemoth of transnational influence on education policy making. To better understand the evolution of the OECD's perspective on education and the importance of PISA within the OECD's overall publications, I analysed over 900 OECD publications on education with a topic modelling approach. The analysis revealed that contrary to popular belief, the OECD is a multi-centric organization with various agendas in education policy making, focusing on economic changes, higher education, management, planning, and budgeting. PISA made up only 12% of the overall text corpus and was therefore far less discussed than expected. This is in sharp contrast to the general impression held, namely that the OECD's work in education mostly relates to PISA. Therefore, this study reveals that the OECD has a far broader agenda than anticipated. This paper acts as a systematic review of OECD literature to gain insights into its institutional objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In peacebuilding contexts unemployed youth are frequently perceived as a high risk for the stability of a country while employed youth are seen as carrying an enormous potential for economic growth. This paper applies a social justice framework (4Rs) in analysing a Business Development (BD) programme that was implemented as part of Sierra Leone's Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) strategy to promote entrepreneurship development and reduce unemployment among youth. Despite the BD programme's initial strengths, to recognize youth's heterogeneity with the aim to address some of the root causes of the war, we show how the programme struggled to counter social inequality, unemployment and neopatrimonialism. Sudden decreases in donor funding led to severe modifications of redistribution processes, thereby hampering youth's representation. This raises questions about the design of TVET strategies and BD programmes in post-conflict settings in general. Our paper further showcases how the resurfacing of the root causes of a conflict in the scope of small-scheme development programmes, can have far-reaching effects on young people's various relationships of trust, if not reconciliation process as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the spread of a litigation culture in the UK education sector, with members of the public increasingly seeking recourse to the law to appeal, complain, or achieve compensation. The increasing tendency of people to resort to litigation suggests that recourse to the law is seen as a more immediate form of taking education services to account. While in theory an effective accountability tool, this development has unfortunately produced some less than desirable consequences in educational institutions, most notably the avoidance of risk. This paper argues that such consequences need to be understood as a reflection of the limits placed on legal regulation, once it encounters the already highly regulated world of educational institutions. To flesh out this argument, this paper examines these limits as a set of consequences relating to the following: increasing juridification; the intersection of law and mechanisms of accountability, judgement and professional discretion; and the relation between risk and trust. The argument draws on the 'law in context' literature, as well as recent debates over the pathologies of legal freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department for Education (DfE) in England seeks to determine the actions of educationists in both the public and private sectors through the use of targeted instructive documents and white papers where broader policy intention is presented. Since 2010, as we will show, there has been a shift in the nature of such papers towards justification with 'evidence' and transparency through referencing in a 'scientific' style, with ramifications for both how policy is justified and the contestation of practices in education. This leads us to suggest that we are in an 'evidence era' where a dominant rationalized myth centres on the use of 'evidence' to justify practice. Meanwhile, how 'evidence' is constructed as research is undertaken, and how it is transformed as it enters a political environment, are important questions that are often overlooked. In this text, we analyse the change in 'evidence' practices before and after 2010, consider why the practices changed, and infer the effects the changes have had on the wider education environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issues that social researchers study and policymakers address are partly determined by how they think about the world around them. Their view of the social world often depends on their position within it. What their research reveals and their policies propose are, in part, a reflection of where they choose to look and how they interpret the world they identify. The result can be a myopic view of the social and a distorted explanation of how social relations work. In this paper, we argue the need to widen the aperture of the lens that social researchers and policymakers use to investigate and ameliorate educational disadvantage. In particular, in matters of education equity, beyond measuring opportunities and outcomes of target groups, we argue the need to consider the substantiveness of opportunities as well as the subjective conditions and objective contexts that mediate how people transform their resources into outcomes. Drawing on the work of both Bourdieu and Sen, we propose an expanded evaluative framework that outlines five spaces for assessing educational disadvantage: position and disposition, capital interaction, capability expansion, conversion ability, and conditioned choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]