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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]

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]

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]

Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding 'parent engagement' are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new 'governing parent-citizen' through which the parental labour of social reproduction is being extended, valorised and rearticulated. We examine how one major reform movement in Australia is articulating new roles for parents and community members in schools: the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia. Our analysis demonstrates the intensive policy intervention required to produce this new form of parental labour and the subsequent divisions of labour it is producing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines ethnic segregation in schools as a field where policy inaction, or non-decision making, is rife. A theoretical framework rooted in historical institutionalism and combining critical junctures with path dependencies enables the study of non-decision making and policy inaction. Moving from non-decision making as a general phenomenon to the specific case of British education policies, the focus is on ethnoreligious segregation between White British and South Asian Muslim students, which has become a salient issue in British politics and society. After a general discussion, the article zooms in on a North English town presenting typical constellations of ethnic segregation and mixing in neighbourhoods and schools. The subsequent policy analysis shows how, from the mid-1980s until recently, non-decision making has been predominant. Given the ongoing problematization of ethnic segregation in British politics and society, a reversal from policy inaction to formal decision-making seems possible. The article offers insight into the inner workings of non-decision making that have wider application, transcending any given locality and policy sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) schools have an important role to play, but precisely how policy actors and educators should best respond to extremism within their schools remains uncertain. Reporting on data from a broader study, this article draws on semi-structured interviews with three participants. The participants were working as policy intermediaries responsible for implementing a federally funded, small-scale grant to develop a program in four Australian schools intended to guard against student behaviours deemed 'at risk' of leading to violent extremism. Investigating the strategies and negotiations of these policy intermediaries, we demonstrate the politicization of policy enactment in the field of P/CVE. We draw on Beck's work to understand the discourses of risk that underpin the P/CVE space and to focus on the strategic negotiations of these policy intermediaries as responses to various forms of risk. The findings contribute to understandings of 'risk management' in a neoliberal state particularly in the development and enactment of policy in education, through a focus on how policy intermediaries operate in an 'in-between' space between federal prerogatives and local constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]