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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]

This paper critically examines parents' and service providers' reception of the Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme (PEVS), which was designed to enhance the quality of early childhood education in Hong Kong. The PEVS was a universal voucher policy that was designed to harness market forces and increase direct governmental control of quality in a private education market wherein pre-academic training and competition are emphasized. This paper presents the results of a survey of 413 parents and 215 service providers. Findings indicated that despite the government's efforts in promoting quality as 'child-centeredness' and the efforts of preschools in meeting the quality standards, parents remained relatively neutral about the policy's influence on preschool quality. However, all parents appreciated the financial benefits they accrued from the PEVS, and more socially-advantaged families allocated the additional disposable income on extra educational activities and programs for their children. Findings suggest the implementation of the PEVS in a fully private market might unexpectedly exacerbate inequity in educational opportunities. The enrolment size of the preschool was also found to be a determinant of respondents' views of the PEVS. We argue the government's idea of 'joyful learning' may be even harder to achieve with the current means of service governance. [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.

This paper reports a rhetorical analysis of policy texts illustrating the emergence of the mandatory Educational Leader role in early childhood services in Australia. We argue that policy texts before 2012 constructed a 'problem' of workforce quality in early childhood education and offered a new leadership configuration as a policy solution. We identify and critically address how this social architecture was constructed and made persuasive through key rhetorical devices, particularly the combined pathos of the vulnerable child and a logos of quality improvement. Initial analysis indicated an apparent contradiction between the economic rationalism of earlier (policy advice) texts and an emphasis on professional dispositions in the later (policy implementation) texts, when describing the Educational Leader. We argue, however, that these policy implementation documents reinforce, rather than contradict, a neoliberal economistic logos, because they attempt to form Educational Leaders as autonomous moral agents of neoliberal responsibilization. We conclude by considering some potential implications of our analysis for the early childhood field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All over the globe, educational technology (EdTech) is being sold to schools as a central mechanism for improving access to quality learning for high poverty populations. There is a growing scholarship that interrogates the institutional drivers of the ‘EdTech craze’. Building on this work, this paper examines how technocentrism as a specific strain of neoliberalism is reflected at both the organizational and institutional levels, both by private and public sectors in the case of school education in India. We argue that using institutional theory to explain complex multi-layered reforms means looking in tandem at macro principles defined through interactions in the organizational field and the re-experiencing and transformation of those processes at the micro level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of A-level examination results in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has become one of the major diary items in the news media's calendar. This paper is based, in part, upon the findings of an inter-disciplinary study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It explores two key questions about the relationship between the education sector and news media in the UK. Firstly, it asks why educationalists appear to have become pessimistic about the possibilities for raising the quality of media debate about education. Secondly, it takes the example of the annual coverage of A-level results, in order to discuss why education news coverage tends to adhere to templates that many educationalists criticize as producing ritualistic and polarized coverage. The paper concludes by exploring some suggestions for those who are seeking ways to influence the quality of education news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the dual dependencies apparent at the intersection of the media society and the audit society by empirically exploring and discussing the relationship between Swedish local newspaper coverage and school inspection activities. The research questions pertain to the Inspectorate’s media strategy, how inspection is represented and conveyed, the messages sent, and who gets to speak. Literature on governance, and the role and function of the media in the wider audit society is applied theoretically. Four municipalities were selected to represent different demographical and economical structures and previous inspection experiences. The empirical material includes interviews with leading inspection officers and newspaper articles. The local newspapers portray the Inspectorate as a legitimate institution acting on behalf of and protecting the public, and even more so, the educational consumer. The current format used by the Inspectorate – a succinct reporting only on deviations – links with a favored format of the media, reinforcing the tight media–inspection relationship and leading to implications for education governance and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The commitment to establish a ‘school-led’ system of teacher education in England, announced by the Coalition Government in 2011 and relentlessly pursued thereafter, represented a radical departure from previous kinds of initial teacher education partnership. While it is entirely consistent with a neoliberal agenda, with its strong regulatory framework and appeal to market mechanisms, it is also underpinned by a particular conception of teaching as a craft – ‘best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’. In 2014, the government established a Review of Initial Teacher Training, led by a primary school head teacher, Sir Andrew Carter. This signalled the recognition of teacher education as a ‘policy problem’, adopting Cochran-Smith’s term. The ensuing report, published in early 2015, was more nuanced than might have been anticipated, although a number of profound tensions emerge from a closer analytical reading; four of these tensions are similar to those previously defined by Cochran-Smith and two are newly emergent. This paper identifies and discusses these tensions as they appear in the Carter Review and relates them to wider debates about the links between teaching, teacher education, evidence and research and to policy-making processes in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2000, the PISA test implemented by OECD has become the prime benchmark for international comparisons in education. The 2015 PISA edition introduced methodological changes that altered the nature of its results. PISA made no longer valid non-reached items of the final part of the test, assuming that those unanswered questions were more a problem of motivation than skills. Latin American countries were the only ones that had a large proportion of non-reached items in the first PISA editions. The methodological change had a large impact in these countries and was miscommunicated by the OECD reports. This makes the first two PISA editions (2000 and 2003) no longer comparable with the latest ones (2006, 2009, 2012 and 2015). We analyze hypotheses for the Latin American exception in PISA, suggesting that the introduction of the new Computer-Based Assessment of PISA in 2015, combined with an increasing culture of evaluation and political influences damaged intertemporal comparisons of PISA. Although PISA is a low-stakes assessment for students, it has become high-stakes for governments. This triggered mechanisms to increase test-taking motivation, and students tended to answer more questions of the test, but at the same time, these changes made intertemporal comparisons flawed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study detailed in this paper examines the growing role of non-state actors in the transnational policy-making landscape through a case study of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) – a partnership of donor and developing country governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, private companies and foundations, dedicated to increasing access to quality education worldwide. Conducted through a constructivist lens, this study examines the roles of non-state GPE partners who collaborate as diverse stakeholders within this single policy-making forum. Via a process-tracing analysis, including an examination of GPE meeting documents and interviews with members of the GPE Board of Directors and Secretariat staff, I trace the past and current roles of non-state partners within the GPE – in particular, civil society, private foundations and private companies. I conclude that the GPE has evolved into a forum in which civil society actors have become relatively influential, while private sector foundations and companies have for the most part been disengaged and made only a tangible impact. These findings can be attributed to the differently constructed identities of each group of actors. The study concludes that shared normative beliefs and worldviews, which characterize epistemic communities, may be a key element to cohesion, functioning, and thereby influence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we experiment with the idea of combining path dependency, convergence and contingency in explaining Finnish distinctiveness in education policy and politics since the early 1990s. The focus of this paper is on quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) in comprehensive schooling. We elaborate on and contextualise the Finnish QAE model by analysing the particular and somewhat ambiguous ways in which global QAE practices have -- or have not -- been received and mediated in Finland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden's education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost, in both independent and public schools. This two-pronged study first examines to what extent the consequences of this reform deviate from the predicted results. It demonstrates increasing discrepancies between absolute test results and grades, suggesting grade inflation. Secondly, the study investigates whether the school choice reform was institutionally secured against school competition based on phenomena that are unrelated with educational quality, such as grading. It reveals that the architects of the school choice reform overemphasized the potential positive implications of market reforms and, therefore, did not deem it necessary to establish appropriate rules and institutions for school competition. Instead, grading and curriculum reforms had unintended consequences such as grade inflation and similar forms of school competition in dimensions other than school quality. The analysis of how the objective of raising the quality in Sweden's schools through competition and choice was inadvertently undermined contains practical lessons for policymakers with regard to the use of privatization and co-production both in schools and in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how after 43 years of unsatisfactory outcomes, the Ministry of Education of Peru (MoE) suddenly ranked at the top of governmental performance tables. To do so, this study relies on implementation and major discussions of policy instrument theories to provide a comprehensive explanation of the reasons underlying the MoE’s improvements. Methodologically, this research employs the mixed research methods paradigm. It combines process-tracing and regression analysis. The analyses show that the MoE underwent three major events in its route to achieve policy success. First, the approval of a long-term policy plan (National Educative Plan to 2021); second, the contentious legitimisation of governmental policies against Peru’s teachers’ union and its eventual defeat; and, third, the recentralisation of historically dispersed control functions in the MoE. The results indicate that upon the occurrence of these reforms, MoE’s bureaucrats could gain teachers’ legitimacy and eventually achieve complementarity of policy tools. In fact, the multiple regression analysis suggests positive and significant interdependence between the set of tools employed by MoE officers: parents’ voluntary monetary contribution to schools (sermon), economic incentives to outperform schools (carrots) and trimestral oversight of schools’ performance (sticks). Results also show that MoE’s tools are positively associated with satisfactory student-learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents one of the few qualitative studies to empirically examine the collaboration between private sponsors and principals in the context of England’s academy schools policy. It uses the concept of boundary-work to illuminate the multiple dynamics involved in the collaboration between principals and business sponsors. By analysing qualitative interviews with principals and sponsors from a local authority case study the article reveals the working relationship between these actors to be characterised by three boundary-work practices: drawing, negotiating and contesting boundaries. These practices are described before exploring their implications for existing understandings of England’s academies policy. This analysis directly answers calls in the literature for in-depth case study research which explores the collaboration between academy sponsors and principals, and the article’s interpretivist approach to boundary-work is shown to be a valuable theoretical approach which has received little attention in studies investigating the role of private actors in education. The article concludes by advocating for more studies of education policy to use boundary-work as a lens through which to understand the role being played by new actors in education, and argues that this perspective would be particularly valuable for examining the context of England’s increasingly diversifying schooling landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses a specific part of the actions taken to improve the quality of Swedish education, namely the expectations formulated in national policy documents for the quality work that local authorities, schools and teachers are supposed to undertake. For the empirical analysis of how these expectations have changed over the last two decades, two sets of theoretical concepts have been combined: management of placement and management of expectation and autonomy and control. The specific research question is: How can local systematic quality work be understood in an age of accountability and what are the implications for teachers’ practices? The results show that expectations for local quality work have changed radically during the studied period. There has been a significant change in the language used, the content of education has been recontextualised and there are obvious changes in the relation between local autonomy and national control. It is argued that these changes are a consequence of the changed design of the education system, rather than an answer to a content-related question of what is educationally desirable. As a consequence, paradoxical expectations land at the local level and have to be resolved by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The past decades saw a rise in internationalised education in Europe. Based on case studies at Dutch schools, I argue that the introduction of this type of education can be understood by the increased need for schools to adapt to the social reproduction strategies of privileged social classes. School managers regard internationalised streams as a way to counter a decline of pupils or as a strategy to improve an already secure position. In both cases, they resisted protesting staff in their efforts to establish an exclusive image of their internationalised stream. I argue that school managers' inclination to emphasise the exclusive and 'high-quality' profile of their internationalised streams and their propensity to celebrate the abilities of their pupils stem from their competitive engagement with local education markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]