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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]

The increased use of quantitative education data is often regarded by scholars as evidence of the emergence of'governing by numbers'. These scholars ascribe major stakeholders such as the OECD and nation states agency as they produce, distribute and consume data, and respond to these with policy and management initiatives. This paper argues that metrics themselves have a configurative agency that affects education in terms of educational ideas and designs. The paper illustrates this point by analysing two cases of graduate employability metrics, each of which configures education differently, and discusses how the configurative agency of metrics can become the focal point of a different research agenda using distinct analytical concepts drawn from the sociology of quantification and new materialism. The paper concludes that such a research agenda can enable actors involved in the design and development of education to enter into a professional dialogue and engagement with education data, rather than merely dismissing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of expanding global educational privatization and shifting policies on how to fund educational facilities in many states in the US, this study engages the lenses of critical policy analysis and fiscal sociology to examine educational privatization in the school facilities industry in California. Employing critical policy document analysis to examine approximately 40 primary and secondary source documents including propositions, bills, government and education codes, facilities reports, and state public debt data, this paper addresses the following research question: How have education finance policies shaped the system of school district facilities financing over time, specifically with regard to the field of private actors involved in the school facilities industry? This paper examines the historical policy context for privatization in school district facilities financing, evaluating how policies have evolved, been implemented, and affected stakeholders over time in the broader neoliberal context. Findings indicate that policies promoting privatization in education finance impact school districts’ abilities to provide equitable facilities to their students. Also, the complex and intermittent process of financing school facilities has facilitated the rise of specialized private actors in the school facilities industry that has now organized to engage in private-sector policy setting. [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]

Along with the dramatic expansion of private tutoring around the world, a significant body of literature has been produced to understand this phenomenon. While many studies consider the issue of geographic location, the spatial dimension tends not to be a central focus of private tutoring studies. In contrast, the present essay applies mobility theory to research from Cambodia, where private tutoring is essential to student success. It does so in order to place private tutoring provision into a broader perspective that includes but moves beyond the economic dimensions of supply and demand and the sociological dimensions of economic, cultural, and social capital to include consideration of how private tutoring provision is constrained by a multidimensional spatial field of possibilities and how private tutoring participation is enabled by one's position and abilities in relation to that field. The paper argues for increased attention to 'spatial capital' in studies of private tutoring and education generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly mediatised policy processes influence practice in schools as education becomes a site of parental anxiety and choice exacerbated by standardised national assessment and ranking of schools in the media. This paper analyses the responses to media scrutiny of six principals whose schools’ national test results were reported in the Australian press following the release of the federal Labour Government’s MySchool website in 2010. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, the concept of cross-field effects, and associated research on mediatisation, the evidence suggests that the relationships between the press, education policy and schools are highly contested, and that principals have some agency in talking back regarding their school’s reported ‘performance’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools,in particular school governors– those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]