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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]

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]

This paper investigates how and why test-based accountability (TBA), a global model for education reform, began to dominate educational debates in Norway in the early 2000s, and how this policy has been operationalised and institutionalised over time. In examining the adoption and retention of TBA in Norway, we build on the cultural political economy framework, in combination with a political sociology-driven approach to policy instruments. The analysis draws on two data sources: four White Papers and 37 in-depth interviews with top-level politicians, policy-makers and stakeholders, conducted between September 2017 and February 2018. The findings indicate that 'scandalisation' of Norway's below-expected PISA results and promotion of standardised testing as a neutral device contributed to the relatively abrupt adoption of national testing in the early 2000s. The increasingly dominant policy discourse equalising education quality and learning outcomes led to the institutionalisation of TBA, developed to ensure equity and quality standards in a decentralised education system. Increased visibility, benchmarking and administrative control are identified as key mechanisms in putting pressure on local actors to re-orient their behaviour. The study provides original insights into the drivers, expectations and strategies underlying TBA in a social democratic institutional regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to growing pushback to decades of privatization and disinvestment in high-poverty communities of color, elected officials and business leaders in the United States have turned to 'community-engaged strategies' to advance education reform. This qualitative case study of a California school district, the Oakland Unified School District, from 1989 to 2019 uses a Gramscian analysis of hegemony to illuminate the shift from coercive practices of financial audits to building consent through the district's formal engagement strategies as tools to manage public dissent around divisive decisions. Findings reveal that a manufacturedscrisis facilitated the 2003 state takeover of OUSD to further advancesausterity measures and audit processes that served as racialized formssof fiscal surveillance. When local resistance to these measures intensified, district actors shifted tactics to 'engage' community members through a portfolio strategy to manage school choice options and other public-private partnerships. Oakland public schools are a prime case of how democratic mechanisms serve as the vehicle to manufacture public consent for district redesign by way of marketization. This paper contributes new insights into local and global debates on educational privatization by critically examining the role of parastatal audit agencies in shaping community support for public-privateeducation governance along with tracing the shifting tactics of elite policy actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implementation of Singapore's landmark policy, 'Thinking Schools, learning Nation' (TSLN), in developing 'thinking students' through the prism of student voice. In the context of twenty-first century education and the growing importance of student voice in education, this paper argues that the time might be right to 'disrupt' Singapore's education status quo and incorporate meaningful student voice in education policies. Instead of perceiving students as mere subjects of educational policy enactment, and seeing policy as something that is done to them, it should be reconceptualised as something which is done with them; importantly, students should be recast as key co-agents of educational change, consistent with TSLN's reconceptualization of learners as 'thinking students'. Basing its arguments on findings from a qualitative case study of students' perceptions and schooling experiences of critical thinking in TSLN, this paper considers the case for the inclusion of significant student voice in Singapore's educational policy reforms. It fills gaps in research on student voices in Singapore's educational reforms and TSLN's research from students' perspective. The paper suggests that the inclusion of student voice in educational reform might be the next landmark step in 'disrupting' its educational landscape after the 'big bang' of TSLN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little conclusive evidence linking academies reform in England with school improvement. While this reform has been effective in improving educational outcomes in some contexts, it has been resoundingly unsuccessful in others. Nevertheless, political faith in autonomous schooling as key to a world-class education remains strong. This paper considers how matters of context impact on approaches to and enactments of this policy. Drawing on case study data from two groups of primary schools from (1) a local authority and (2) an academy chain, the paper examines the particular situated, professional, material and external factors that impact on these schools' capacities to cope with and respond to academies reform. In light of the continued tendency within policy for schools to be dematerialised, the paper argues the ongoing significance of greater attention to matters of context in understanding how schools are navigating the complex terrain of this reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Test-based accountability or 'TBA,' as a core element of the pervasive Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), has become a central characteristic of education systems around the world. TBA often comes in conjunction with greater school autonomy, enabling governments to assess 'school quality' (i.e. test results) from a distance. Often, quality improvement is further encouraged through the publication of these results. Research has investigated this phenomenon and its effects, much of it focusing on Anglo-Saxon cases. This paper, drawing on expert interviews and key policy documents, couples a policy borrowing with a policy instruments approach to critically examine how and why TBA has developed in the highly autonomous Dutch system. It finds that TBA evolved incrementally, advancing towards higher stakes for schools and boards. Further, it argues that school autonomy has been central to the development of TBA in two ways. Firstly, following a period of decentralisation that increased school(board) autonomy, the Dutch government saw a need to strengthen accountability to ensure education quality. This was influenced by international discourse and accelerated by a (politically exploited) national 'quality crisis' in education. Secondly, the traditionally autonomous Dutch system, shaped by 'Freedom of Education', has at times conflicted with TBA, and has played a significant role in (re)shaping global policy and in mitigating the GERM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorises how politics, economy and migrant population policies influence educational policy, utilising Bourdieusian theoretical resources to analyse the Chinese context. It develops the work of Lingard and Rawolle on cross-field effects and produces an updated three-step analytical framework. Taking the policy issue of the schooling of internal migrant children as an example, it analyses how a range of fields – political, economic and public policy – ‘export’ their logics of practice into the educational policy field (as a sub-field of the public policy field) and consolidate the changes. The cross-field effects shape the state school enrolment policy and the relative positions of agents and the relative value of their capital in the educational policy field. This paper demonstrates the analytical capacity of Bourdieusian theoretical resources for policy analysis in the Chinese context, by illustrating how the inequalities experienced by migrant families have been intensified in education by cross-field effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a fundamental aspect of policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores teachers’ resistance against pedagogic reform in South Korea, which was instituted in the form of an in-service teacher certification. Ideas for the reform, Teaching English in English (TEE), were borrowed from ‘native-English-speaking countries’ and implemented without systematic localization, therefore, it was not surprising that teachers resisted it, although hidden from the reform managers to avoid disciplinary action. The paper starts with a description of the educational context in South Korea, which has fashioned teachers’ practices of resistance. The conceptualization of resistance follows, drawing on studies from varied disciplines, including Foucault’s work on resistance ‘of conduct’ (counter-conducts) and Scott’s ‘invisible’ resistance. Findings from a case study of the TEE certification are then discussed. Teachers were engaged in various forms of low-profile resistance, which culminated to impact on the fate of the certification. The paper highlights the potential impact of resistance on the course of a reform, which has often been disregarded as non-constituent or unimportant or even misunderstood as compliance by reform managers and researchers. Thus, it contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of teachers’ resistance in the context of educational reforms, which has wider implications, as borrowed educational reforms are becoming all too frequent around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including educational reform, neoliberalism and teacher agency.

In early 2015, the Australian Government and an associated Ministerial Group called for 'urgent national action to improve the quality of initial teacher education'. Following this call for action, the Australian Government launched a series of reforms into initial teacher education, targeting 'teacher quality' and 'classroom readiness'. The reforms are based on a logic of deficiency within initial teacher education, mandating new accreditation processes, standardized assessments and the National Literacy and Numeracy Test for pre-service teachers. In this paper we set out to explore these reforms, considering the policy trajectories, technologies and technicist network in which they are operationalized. We propose the concept of reification and objectification to examine the institutionalization of auditing, standardization, and accountability. These reforms aim to intervene in both the content and delivery of initial teacher education. We argue that reforms such as these recondition our conceptions of professionalism and teacher quality. There is a contraction in scope for progressive or experiential teacher education, and moreover, the ongoing de-professionalism of teachers and teacher educators, whom are subjected to constant surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the discursive shifts of emphasis of school headship since the 1980s in England, and the ways in which the repositioning of head teachers has gradually transformed professional work and relationships in schools via a discourse of management. Specifically, the paper identifies a ‘trilogy of school headship in England’ to indicate a process by which school headship has been repositioned – from head teacher, to manager, and to leader from the Education Reform Act of 1988 onwards. Drawing primarily on policy texts, the construction, within policy, of a head teacher endowed with power, responsibility and freedom will be detailed. Informed by both Fairclough and Foucault’s conceptions of discourse, this paper concludes that as a policy technology management subjects head teachers to ‘a twin process of autonomization plus responsibilization’ within which they become the linchpin of the delivery chain of policy and play a key role in the formation of ‘performative professionalism’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Driven by a desire to improve academic outcomes and transform ‘failing’ schools, governments around the world have often turned to the development of new forms of state-funded school. This paper looks at three such instances of the introduction of new forms of schooling, within three urban localities (academy schools in London; charter schools and small schools of choice in New York City; and Schools of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro). It considers the extent to which these types of school did improve academic outcomes for their students and draws comparisons across each case study in order to understand their similarities and differences. It concludes that although the quasi-marketisation of school systems through the introduction of new (often private) providers might improve outcomes, this is not the only means by which improvement can be attained; and that instead the introduction of new forms of school may be successful because this enables certain other changes to happen. It highlights the limited nature of impact evidence available in all instances, which restricts our ability to properly evaluate the effect of new school types on outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to elucidate a specific type of charter school. While much has been written about school choice and the expanding charter school segment, a growing and important number of charter schools do not fit in to the common understanding of these schools. Distinct from many of their counterparts,prestige charter schoolshave the following two features:elementswhich foster a reputation similar to that of eliteprivate schoolsand a student populationdemographically distinctfrom local public district schools – whereby the prestige charters serve a disproportionate number of advantaged families. The prestige elementsinclude:founding by advantaged community members; parental involvement; wait lists; popularity with advantaged professionals; high test scores; and niche themes. The authors will show through two in-depth case studies that prestige charter schools work hand-in-hand with gentrification in urban neighborhoods, and result in racial and class segregation and inequality. This paper examines how these charter schools struggle when a rise in prestige coincides with a decline in access for low-income students. The authors recommend that given the current system of school choice, prestige charter schools must use tools and mechanisms to maintain demographic diversity and educational equity which is in the best interest ofallchildren. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past three decades, two neoliberal educational reform efforts have emerged in tandem – the charter school movement and Teach For America (TFA). This paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, ‘shit shows,’ and ‘like-minded schools.’ Grounded in corps members’ teaching experiences, this paper argues that even at its best, the close partnership between TFA and charters can create a mutually reinforcing educational subculture that is isolated from broader educational discourses and practices. At its worst, this partnership can result in the ill-advised ‘propping up’ of under-funded, mismanaged, ill-equipped charters that might otherwise struggle to find adequate staffing and, consequently, close. This paper suggests that these two tendencies – toward corps members’ insularity and poor placement – have the potential to conflict with the charter movement’s and TFA’s stated purposes of improving the quality of schooling for disadvantaged and marginalized students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of cultural and historical factors on educational policy transfer, drawing on an analysis of the curricular reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation of the two Koreas. In South Korea, curricular changes were made, such as the introduction of the subject of social studies, in order to teach democratic procedures and concepts. In North Korea, a socialist–communist ideology was extensively promoted, along with an attraction to the Soviet Union as a model state to follow. In both contexts, the localization of the reforms was influenced by the authoritarian legacy of Confucianism and Japanese colonization, and the nationalism that had been fostered for the purpose of state formation. The Korean case indicates that while investigating the influence of culture on educational policy transfer, it is important to identify the unique characteristics of educational traditions and nationalism of a country, and to analyze how the newly transferred policies and ideas are received by local actors in their searches for meaning and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, a local variant of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD’s) influential PISA that not only assesses an individual school’s performance in reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems, but also promotes 17 identical examples of ‘best practice’ from ‘world class’ schooling systems (e.g. Shanghai-China, Singapore). Informed by 33 semi-structured interviews with actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, and supplemented by the analysis of relevant documents, the paper provides an account of how these concrete examples of best practice are represented in the report received by participating schools. Drawing upon thinking around processes of commensuration and the notion of ‘governing by examples’, the paper argues that PISA for Schools discursively positions participating schools as somehow being commensurable with successful schooling systems, eliding any sense that certain cultural and historical factors – or ‘out of school’ factors – are inexorably linked to student performance. Beyond encouraging the problematic school-level borrowing of policies and practices from contextually distinct schooling systems, I argue that this positions the OECD as both the global expert on education policy and now, with PISA for Schools, the local expert on ‘what works’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing the analytical framework of a discourse-driven social change, this paper unpacks the neoliberal concept of ‘educational quality’ in the course of Russian education modernisation reform from 1991 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the global neoliberal discourse has served as the backbone for post-Soviet educational ideology. Alongside other major reform initiatives, the ‘quality revolution,’ proclaimed by the Russian Government in the early 1990s, signified a rhetoric shift away from the Soviet-era quality control towards a neoliberal quality assurance paradigm. Through fine-grained textual analysis of policy documents and political statements by key educational stakeholders, the analysis unpacks the discursive underbelly of the new quality paradigm, in an attempt to determine whether a paradigmatic transformation has taken place. The paper argues that despite the nominally proclaimed shift towards a quality assurance model of educational governance, the representation of educational stakeholders and responsibilities within the new quality paradigm continues to correspond to the Soviet-era command-and-control authoritarian model. The study challenges the popular claim of a neoliberal turn in Russian education and suggests that a neoconservative authoritarian approach to education governance has been smuggled in under the disguise of ‘quality assurance.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reformers in developing countries increasingly seek to raise education quality. Yet we know little about the politics of improving education. One significant and instructive case of reforms designed to boost education quality comes from Chile, where in 2016 the government enacted a sweeping reform of teaching careers. This paper first uses a quantitative analysis of appearances in the news to identify key stakeholders and then turns to process tracing to analyze how and when these stakeholders influenced reform dynamics. Comparatively, the Chilean case differs from similar reforms elsewhere in Latin America due to the absence of business, the strong role of policy networks, and the final negotiated settlement with the teacher union. Theoretically, the analysis confirms general theories that emphasize the roles of distributive politics and policy networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report on our investigation of news coverage of accountability reform in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal during the implementation and assessment of New York's Race to the Top-inspired teacher evaluation system. In systemically analyzing how these prominent media outlets narrated this contentious moment in educational history, this study seeks to identify major narrative features pertinent to the ideological and representational dimensions of teachers in the era of consequential accountability. Specifically, we examine character prevalence, the characterization of prevalent characters, and the valuations ascribed to prevalent characters. This analysis, thus, aims to account for the mediatization of accountability reform. Our findings suggest that both periodicals constructed a one-dimensional conflict between education reformers and resisters of the newly implemented accountability policies while narrating those most affected by the policies as passive bystanders to the ideological conflict being waged by those with more power and influence. This reductionist narrative gives voice to reformers' audit-based notion of accountability while omitting the relational responsibility of educators – the form of accountability long associated with teachers' work. In accounting for ideological and representational features of journalists' narrative construction, we illuminate how prominent media outlets mediatize accountability policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades privatization policies have taken centre stage in many processes of educational reform globally. In Latin America, these policies have played an important role since the 1990s leading to an increasing participation of private agents in educational provision. The case of Uruguay stands out for having remained somehow apart from this privatization agenda. More recently, however, research has identified a significant shift in the discursive order especially driven by a series of new actors including think tanks and civil society organizations favourable to different forms of privatization. Building on case study methods and informed by a cultural political economy (CPE) approach this paper addresses two purposes. First, it attempts to explore possible explanations for the scarce development of the private sector in Uruguayan education. Second, it aims to characterize the discourses and strategies increasingly used by different actors to frame and promote policy ideas potentially leading to privatization policies. The study shows how a small but influential number of actors have become involved in the process of promoting ideas that seek to influence policymaking. Findings reveal how these actors frame school autonomy and accountability as policy solutions by means of different strategies of networking and knowledge mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a model for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of judicial involvement in educational reforms. It uses the model to analyze two case studies of court-led educational reforms in the third rail of Israeli politics – the curricula and the admission policies of ultra-Othodox (Haredi) schools. These case studies are located at the knotty junction of human rights, religion, and politics in education policy, generating concern in many countries. The conclusions demonstrate that even when the courts are cautious, judicial involvement in third rail educational reforms may produce impacts that drive the cogwheels of policy-making in directions that are apt to undermine the interests of the petitioners. Therefore, the choice of courts as a forum for shaping education policy in political third rails should be prudently considered. The paper also demonstrates the need to evaluate litigation by means of a contextual, evidence-based analysis. It highlights that in certain cases, what may appear to be unjustified judicial activism or restraint is, in fact, a reasonable response, whose harmful ramifications may be attributed to the context of political third rails. Even the best judges are not immune to the well-known assertion that ‘hard cases make bad law.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Juxtaposed with the emerging body of literature about datafication in schooling, this paper examines the increasing encroachment of data into the Japanese education system, in particular, the use of data associated with standardised academic assessments for governance purposes. In so doing, we use the Japanese 'case' to expose the possible limits of the existing English-language scholarship on this phenomenon. By providing a contextualised, descriptive account of how data is incorporated into the three layers of Japanese education bureaucracy (municipal, prefectural, national), we call into question the assumed universality of datafication in schooling and its effect as proffered by Anglo-American education policy scholars. Using the Japanese case, the study elucidates the ways in which the particular policy context of the Anglo-American countries, where datafication has been extensively studied, sets certain limits on the existing discussion and leaves underexplored certain questions that might be more relevant to countries and regions beyond Anglo-American education policy contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy-making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on ILSAs and two surveys administered to educational policy experts, researchers, policymakers, and educators, our research found that ILSAs, with their multiple and ambiguous uses, increasingly function as solutions in search for the right problem – that is, they appear to be used as tools to legitimize educational reforms. The survey results pointed to a growing perception among stakeholders that ILSAs are having an effect on national educational policies, with 38% of respondents stating that ILSAs were generally misused in national policy contexts. However, while the ILSA literature indicates that these assessments are having some influence, there is little evidence that any positive or negative causal relationship exists between ILSA participation and the implementation of education reforms. Perhaps the most significant change associated with the use of ILSAs in the literature reviewed is the way in which new conditions for educational comparison have been made possible at the national, regional, and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the role of PISA in the globalisation of education policies. It approaches the question by assessing the effects of PISA on the ways in which new legislation was debated in national contexts in the period 1994–2013. The study asks: Has there been an increase in the number of references to the international community in debates on education policy due to PISA, and, if so, is this change confined to debates on education policy? Our analysis shows that education policy debates feature an increasingly global discourse in which organisations such as the OECD have an authoritative role. Yet, our findings do not support the claim that PISA is the cause of a change in this respect. Debating national policies in a global context and utilising the same transnational discourses regardless of the policy issue area in question has long been with us, yet there is a global trend in which national policies are increasingly often debated through appeals to models and policy advice promulgated by international organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how Teach for Bangladesh (TfB) has utilised Facebook since 2012 in its effort to extend its policy influence and message to young Bangladeshi graduates and local population. We reveal this as an example of how Facebook has become a powerful new platform for policy mediatisation. This is also a developing world-example of a [global] policy rewritten [locally] as audio-video bytes. Our analyses reveal three ways in which TfB sought to influence these graduates, but also the local government and public, via Facebook. First, it created opportunities for recurrent reading, hearing and seeing the policy in practice as animated by ‘stars’, ‘spectacles’, ‘glamour’ and ‘statistics’, all of which regularise a sense of heroic bodily feeling-as-vernacularisation. Secondly, it sought to inform and reshape the social imaginary and associated problem imagination of the graduates and locals to whom this message was directed. And thirdly, it involved what might be described as a ‘post-truth’ way of engagement via the excessive use of emotional stimulus, manifesting an understanding of the affective aspect of policy. We have used a combination of social network analysis, content analysis and videological analysis in establishing our argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is noted in school reform policy circles as the gold standard of academic excellence. While the presence of IB as a sought-after education vendor has grown in the past decade, the organization has attempted to shake off its image as an elite agency serving only private international schools with its longstanding liberal arts curriculum. As such its turn toward the public sector in the United States with a credential for vocational students appears perplexing and out of step with its product brand, but the newer Career Programme (CP) is marketed as meeting the needs of applied learners in secondary schools. This paper offers a case study of two schools in one US state that adopted the CP, generating IB school enrollments from among talented vocational students while elevating its ranking on the college and career readiness (CCR) score, an annual assessment of postsecondary success. The CCR policy reformers advocate curricular improvements so that all students receive the academic foundations and employability skills needed to thrive in the new economy. Yet the egalitarian discourse of CCR could not be attended to using the CP. In this case study only high-achieving students were advised to participate and enroll in the program. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflecttransnationaltraits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidianpracticesof policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to themoralityof policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and others, and make themselves subjects of policy. We conceive of the processes of translation, its practices and techniques as a form of ethics, the constitution of a contemporary and contingent version of professionalism through the arts of self-conduct. In all of this, it is virtually impossible to separate out, as Foucault points out, capability from control. We argue that the development of new capacities, new skills of classroom management, of pedagogy, bring along with it the intensification of a power relation. We are primarily concerned with Foucault’s third face of power, pastoral power orgovernmentand how this interweaves and overlap with other forms of power within processes of policy and educational reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the state takeover and neoliberal reconstruction of a mid-size urban school district in the California Bay Area. Aligning with research on social networks in school reform, it identifies three organizational nodes of power operating within the takeover and post-takeover landscape: venture-philanthropic capital, the Teach for America organization, and a local intermediary organization that acted as a hub for the capital and labor flowing from these organizations. Their story demonstrates the concrete ways in which an increasingly globalized funding and policy network converged at the district level in order to implement a unified policy agenda. The network's role in school politics, real estate, and gentrification provides a template for the transnational work of school reformers and their role in creating the neoliberal 'global city.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread commitment to inclusive education as government policy, global progress in the last two decades has been slow and uneven. This article explores the relationship between policy and its enactment to examine what conditions make inclusion available as a course of action within education systems. Focusing on learners with additional learning needs, evidence from the Welsh context is presented in relation to two policy turns in the last decade, the most recent of which is a turn towards a Fourth Way 'professional capital approach' that appears to signal movement towards more inclusive education. It is noted that, at the level of practice and practitioner beliefs about learners with additional learning needs, these policy movements appear to have had remarkably little impact. Drawing on a hybrid model of analysis, we argue that the collective agency needed for inclusion requires an account of the belief systems of a range of policy actors, particularly in education systems where hierarchies of learners are fundamentally upheld. Using evidence from educational reform in Wales, we describe how conditions for collective agency for inclusion may be experienced as unavailable within education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so ‘drenched in the past,’ the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt and dysfunctional. This is an incomplete story. While national narratives and news media tend to downplay these features, there is no local consensus on the reforms. There is mistrust on both sides of the debate, and a growing opposition movement, which arises from decades of racial and political struggles, corrupt public officials, and previous experiences with the state exerting power over locally elected school boards, which disenfranchised African-Americans in New Orleans in particular. Although the new, post-Katrina educational system significantly altered political dynamics, it has not eradicated politics altogether. In this paper, I conduct a policy history of education reforms in New Orleans, connecting the historical and political context to current reform efforts. As researchers evaluate the effectiveness of the new reforms in terms of student achievement, it is important also to examine their impacts on communities and the democratic control of schools, as well as how they reproduce or break from historical patterns of political struggle and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite profound changes to the higher education sector in the UK over recent years, which have tended to emphasise the role of prospective students as active choosers within a marketplace and encourage higher education institutions (HEIs) to place more emphasis on student engagement and representation as a means of improving the quality of the learning experience, the role of students’ unions has remained largely unexplored. To start to redress this gap, this paper draws on a UK-wide survey of students’ union officers and a series of focus groups with 86 students and higher education staff in 10 case study institutions. It outlines the ways in which students’ unions are believed, by those closely involved with them, to have changed over recent years, focusing on: the shift towards a much greater emphasis on representation in the role and function of the students’ union; the increasing importance of non-elected officers; and the emergence of more cooperative relationships between the students’ union and senior institutional management. The article then discusses the implications of these findings for both our understanding of the political engagement of students, and theorising student involvement in the governance of HEIs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA's key role in developing and connecting personnel, political support, and financial backing for charter reform. Next we examine how the networks unfold at a local level by zooming in on a case study of New Orleans. By mapping out these connections, we hope to provide a foundation for further investigation of how this network affects policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the critical policy studies of educational governance and its crisis, through canvassing Basil Bernstein's concept of the 'totally pedagogised society' (TPS). The TPS witnesses not only the growth of transnational private actors, but also the disjuncture between global and national agendas of reform, on the governance of knowledge and subjectivity. This argument is illustrated through a court case surrounding the invalidation of a history exam question in Hong Kong, which occurred after the 2019 social unrest. At the heart of this crisis is a dislocation of pedagogic discourse. The history exam can be considered as an indirect outcome of recontextualising the global policy imaginary of producing subjects of 'critical thinking' and 'knowledge economy', but it is incommensurate with China's regulative discourse, that is, to govern the political consciousness of its postcolonial subjects and legitimise its rule through pedagogic means. The concept of TPS considers the other side of a high-performing regime in Asia: the crisis of reform, the return of a strong state, the evolving power and control relations inside/outside the education system, and the rising tensions between pedagogic agents/agencies, in a period of rapid social change as revealed in Hong Kong today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neoliberal university which we inhabit is usually discussed in terms of policies, regulations and governing practices. Yet, academic life is steeped in affect. To illustrate that our political positions are imbued with and arise from affective positions, I present three stories of academics from public universities in Sri Lanka. These stories illustrate the discourses, affective attachments, disenchantments and legitimizations through which individuals come to their positions on higher education policy. Specifically, their positions on privatization are tied to affects generated by frustrations, differences with and loyalties to universities with which they are affiliated. Listening to individual voices complicates our understanding of prevailing public positions on higher education policy. Changes in universities across the world are increasingly analogous, and a discussion of affective positions will help us navigate such changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, a global consensus has emerged that acknowledges that Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) requires systemic, cross-sectoral approaches. In this context, integrated early childhood approaches are flourishing in South America. Although these policies have been successful in many aspects, ECEC provision in the region continues to be fragmented. In this exploratory article, we analyse the role of ECEC curricula in the conceptual integration of ECEC systems in South America. We focus on the 'regulative intent' of curriculum frameworks to explore the extent to which these policy instruments support systemic change. Our analysis draws on an extensive revision of documentary sources and interviews with key local informants in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. We reconstruct the institutional architecture of ECEC provision in each country and examine curricula against this background. Our findings highlight the emergence of a new curricular wave in the region that contributes to integrated approaches. Recent curriculum frameworks move away from sectoral intents and towards more comprehensive and cohesive regulative intents. We call for a reconceptualisation of ECEC curricula from a whole-systems perspective that supports the holistic nature of the education and care of young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2016, 2212 academics have signed a petition to criticise human rights violations in Kurdish cities, and faced grave consequences as a result. By presenting the experiences of six dismissed signatory academics, this article aims to show the effects of authoritarian neoliberal policies on higher education institutions. After demonstrating the AKP government's response to the petition, it accounts for the ways in which authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey responds to its critics, the strategies that it employs to discipline critical academics, and its effects on these individuals and on the Turkish academia as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a historical case study, this article focuses on the ways in which the Greek Government (2015–2019), through involving the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), managed to modify the education conditionalities laid down by the third Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) negotiated with the 'Institutions' (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Using documentary analysis and interviews with top-ranking national educational policy actors, an empirical account is presented of the prolonged encounter between Greek policy-makers, SAP conditionalities, and the policy work of the OECD. The analysis traces the tensions within and between the positions of national and external policy actors as negotiations moved towards a tactical settlement where all sides achieved partial convergence without reaching principled agreement. It reflects on the relevance of the experience of Greece to understandings of global/national relations in the development of educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education reforms that entail increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, assessment and grading have spread across education systems in recent decades. Critics have argued that these policies could have consequences for stress, identity, self-esteem and the overall health of pupils. However, these potentially negative consequences have rarely been investigated in a systematic and rigorous way. In this study we use a major education reform in Sweden, which introduced grades and increased the use of testing for pupils in the 6th and 7th school year (aged 12 to 13 years), to study the consequences of grading and assessment for health outcomes. Using data from the Health Behaviours of School-Aged Children Survey, we find that the reform increased school-related stress and reduced the academic self-esteem of pupils in the 7th school year. This, in turn, had an indirect effect on psychosomatic symptoms and life satisfaction for these pupils. Moreover, the negative effects of the reform were generally stronger for girls, thereby widening the already troubling gender differences in health. We conclude that accountability reforms aimed at increased use of testing, assessment and grading can potentially have negative side effects on pupils' health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focusses on the evolution of the school governance model in Spain since the 1980s. In Spain and elsewhere in Europe, the state's monopoly over education has softened and new forms of educational governance have emerged. This has resulted in the decentralization of decision-making authority to individual schools, municipalities, and regions and a significant increase in school autonomy. We explore from a political science perspective how partisan preferences and teachers unions have decisively shaped the reform trajectory. We show that leftist and center-right governments and different teachers' unions have promoted different versions of school autonomy in line with their ideological rationales, resulting in a reconfiguration of the school governance model with each change in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The devolution of public sector schooling systems has been a feature of education reform since the 1980s. In Western Australia, the Independent Public School (IPS) initiative has recently been installed, announced by the state government in 2009. Now over 80% of the state’s public school students attend IP schools. Drawing on interview data from a broader study of devolution and the conditions of teachers’ work, this article explores the cases of two schools - one IPS and one non-IPS. While both schools were ostensibly disadvantaged, they proved to be highly contrasting schooling sites, responding to the school marketplace in markedly different ways. We consider the ways in which the IPS initiative is contributing to the operation of market dynamics within the public school sector in WA, and argue that it has created new mechanisms for the residualisation of particular, and specifically non-IP, schools. Furthermore, while one school was apparently more of a ‘winner’ within the school marketplace, as it was attracting increasing student enrolments, we query what it might actually mean to ‘win’ in such a policy settlement, with staff at both schools reporting significant dissatisfaction in their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse approaches in education policy analysis have gained prominence in the last decade. However, though the literature on policy discourses is growing, different conceptions of the ‘discursive’ dimension and its potential for empirical analysis related to the field of curriculum policy have not yet been fully researched. To address this gap in education policy research, this article explores the framework of discursive institutionalism. Using background and foreground ideas and coordinative and communicative discourses on three analytically distinct levels, this article proposes and discusses a framework for empirically analysing, explaining and understanding education reforms on the transnational and local levels. The introduced conceptual framework represents an integration of discursive institutionalism (DI) and curriculum theory (CT) to provide a more multifaceted set of concepts to explore the lending and borrowing of transnational education policies and their application at both national and local levels. These concepts have been applied as analytical tools in a research study on the most recent curriculum reform in Sweden, and they may serve as an example of how different ideas, discourses and levels can be distinguished in research studies to maintain the complexity of education reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Policy network approach has become a broadly accepted and frequently adopted practice in modern state governance, especially in the public sector. The study utilises a broadly defined policy network conceptual frame and categories of reference to trace the evolution of education policy-making in China. The study usesThe Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010–2020)as an illustrative case study. This study argues that China’s education policy-making has changed, and the three most prominent changes are the transition from a Party-dominant practice to one primarily driven by the central government, the enhanced role of higher education institutions and scholars as ‘professional interest group’ in the Chinese context and the increasing participation of non-governmental actors in the policy-making process. Essentially exploratory in nature, this study hopes to contribute to the understanding of China’s education policy-making and broader education governance while contributing to the mapping of an important sector of the global education network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal discourses defining and measuring ‘student achievement’ and ‘teacher success’ through myopic high-stakes testing-driven criteria for ‘accountability,’ can perpetuate the very inequities these reforms purport to address. Nested within a five-year inquiry using grounded theory to investigate experiences of Teach For America (TFA) Corps members learning to teach during a district-wide testing cheating scandal, the researchers used Atlas.ti, to analyze 5897 daily reflections written during a yearlong, field-based, initial certification course. Iterative phases of constant comparative analysis utilized a multi-rater/multi-stage/multi-year analysis. This manuscript focuses on the dominant theme of ‘Student Growth and Achievement,’ as defined, conceptualized, and experienced by 38 TFA novice teachers and the co-occurrences of this theme with other dominant themes within this data-set. Findings indicate circumscribed understandings of student growth and achievement which shaped teacher and student engagement, including: (a) narrowing of the scope of teaching by spending significant time atomizing testable skills, drilling students, and administering tests, (b) creating limiting expectations and deficit views of learners, families, and communities when the drill-then-test pedagogy did not produce high test scores, and (c), causing and exacerbating affective distress for teachers and students. Implications for policy-makers, TFA, and educational leaders worldwide are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of the later part of the twentieth century have been marked by the emergence of neoliberalism, which has consequently impregnated the global policy climate with neoliberal technologies of government. It is within this political scenario of hegemonic neoliberal discourse that I explore one aspect of school reform in Malta – contrived school networking as mandated by the policy document ‘For All Children to Succeed’ (FACT), issued in 2005, by which Maltese primary and secondary state schools were geographically clustered into 10 colleges. I explore the influence of neoliberalism and the presence/absence of its characteristics, namely, State central control, the ‘empowerment’ agenda and the tension between autonomy and accountability. This is done both through policy analysis and policy reception – I carry out a documentary analysis of FACT and present this together with the leaders’ views, collated from interviews and observation, after being subjected to narrative analysis and interpreted through Foucault’s concepts of discourse and governmentality. Despite the gradual unfolding of the decentralization process, there is a very strong presence of State central control. Besides methodological significance for policy scholarship, this article has particular philosophical implications for educational policy, practice and theory within the infrastructure of globalized neoliberal governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing data from an original survey of public school parents, I examine the depth and distribution of parents’ knowledge of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). A close exploration of parents’ NCLB knowledge, policy-based experiences, and policy evaluations suggests that a superficial policy understanding may contribute to low uptake of policy-related opportunities and the lack of organized political response to perceived policy pitfalls. Though several other policy initiatives have now been layered atop this particular legislative act, given the policy’s reach and scope, and reliance on parents’ participation, a more careful understanding of NCLB’s effects also suggests how future policy reforms might be tailored to better encourage parent awareness of and participation in the school improvement process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teach for All is a good example of a globally travelling educational reform policy. In this article, we examine the rhetoric of the reform through an analysis of its public discourse, specifically the websites for the umbrella organization, 3 of its 35 constituent projects (Teach for America, Teach First and Teach for China) and one associated project (Teach First Norway). The analysis focuses on the rhetorical production of teaching as something done to other people’s children, in places apart from and outside the communities and schools of dominant populations, and for a while only – as a short-term mission rather than what is usually understood as a professional career. We argue that the principal motive underlying Teach for All’s rhetoric is the cultivation of a cadre of leaders and a form of neoliberal social entrepreneurship that it claims will solve the problem of ‘broken’ societies, public services and, specifically, schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Early years education has received considerable attention in recent years, particularly as a result of longitudinal studies that demonstrate the importance of the first few years in a child’s development and educational experience. In 2004, a new approach to early years education, the Foundation Phase, was introduced in Wales. This is a major flagship policy of the recently devolved Welsh Government, and marks a radical departure from the more assessment-driven competency-based approaches to early childhood education that existed prior to the Foundation Phase. Studying approximately 2000 children in Wales who are part of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), all born in 2000–2001 we investigate the potential impact of the Foundation Phase pilot on a range of key academic and well-being outcome measures. Compared with other children, those attending a Foundation Phase pilot school tended to have lower scores in a number of academic assessments at age seven and lower subjective well-being, in terms of their attitudes to learning and well-being at school. We consider these surprising, yet concerning, results in the context of the methodological limitations to this analysis and propose how the MCS can be further used to substantiate these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]