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Despite the increasing number of studies on educational leadership during COVID-19, little attention has been paid to the intersections of different educational experiences and perspectives of school leaders, students, and their families that occur both inside and outside of schools. Drawing on eight case studies of public primary schools in Hong Kong, this article explores the challenges and strategies of online learning with a focus on effective leadership practices for supporting economically disadvantaged students during COVID-19. To incorporate the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, a series of questionnaires were distributed to principals (n = 8), teachers (n = 150), parents (n = 775), lower primary students (n = 855), and upper primary students (n = 850) and interviews were conducted with principals (n = 8), teachers (n = 37), parents (n = 32), and students (n = 62). Findings indicated that school leaders and teacher teams demonstrated strategic leadership practices prioritising and responding to the needs and constraints of economically disadvantaged students and their families. The present study draws attention to leadership encouraging collaboration among schools, families, and the wider community, which has become necessary during the shift to online learning during COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have extensively studied the prevalence of intensive parenting among middle-class families as a response to uncertainties about maintaining their privileged class status. Most studies, however, have focused on traditional school systems, which overlooks the full spectrum of middle-class parenting values and practices, particularly those beyond mainstream schooling. To address this gap, this study explores an alternative middle-class choice for raising and educating children through the lens of Chinese homeschooling. Drawing on in-depth interviews with middle-class parents from 30 Chinese families of school-age children being homeschooled in Taipei and Hong Kong, this study investigates the paradoxes and ambiguities that arose as the parents navigated and negotiated competing values for their children. The findings reveal that the parents mobilised their cultural repertoires to seek a coherent narrative that made sense of and justified their homeschooling goals and practices in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the global trend towards both middle- and working-class families raising their children intensively increases, social class differences in parenting beliefs and choices for their children have become more subtle. In light of the proliferation of intensive parenting norms, however, few studies have explored particular mechanisms underlying the subtle class differences linked to parental values. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 51 Hong Kong Chinese parents, this study investigated how parents contended with competing values in socialization, which in turn shaped their parenting choices. Three common values emerged from the interviews – academic excellence, hard work and happiness – showing that the middle and working classes managed their values for children in two different ways, termed here as 'values coupling' and 'values juggling', respectively. Middle-class parents were able to make their value choices cohesive through a 'twist' to reconcile between competing values. However, working-class parents were inclined to 'drift' their value choices in the face of unreconciled value tensions as well as structural constraints. Subtle differences in parental values were found to be tied to class position, and contributed to maintaining class inequality and social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to our understanding of the micro-policy experience of an implemented curriculum from the perspective of students, in addition to teachers, as the key coupling agents in the schools of a Chinese global city. Although the phenomenon of decoupling in educational policy is widely recognized, much less attention has been paid to the micro-dynamics involved in implementing education reform policy from the perspective of students and teachers. It is argued that these local actors' experiences are best captured by the bi-dimensional framework of loose coupling and pedagogic modalities. This argument is illustrated through a case study of the implementation of the Liberal Studies reform under Senior Secondary Curriculum in Hong Kong since 2009. The study demonstrates how students and teachers interpret and make sense of policy, strategic, and practical needs manifested in the microprocesses of policy coupling and decoupling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a systematic and critical analysis on the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong's school policies and practice as well as the official documents and statistics, this paper examines the impacts of neoliberalism in four main aspects of school education in Hong Kong: school governance, accountability, privatization and government expenditure. Findings: Convergence, as well as deviation, on neoliberal globalization occurs in the particular Hong Kong context. School bureaucracy has irresistibly expanded. Policymakers have placed increasing emphasis on instrumentally evaluating schools while decentralizing, diversifying and privatizing education. School leadership has become focused solely on succeeding within those imposed performance management and metrics, pulling ahead of school competitions and prioritizing easily quantifiable and measurable tasks. Teachers have faced a potential threat from the loss of autonomy through the market logic and consumerist metrics. The rise of privatized education has further intensified school practices based on competitiveness and performativity. On the other hand, resource cutbacks and financial constraints – problems that are generally inflicted by neoliberal discourse – have rarely occurred in Hong Kong. Research limitations/implications: This study is part of concerted efforts in research that adopts the comparative and critical perspectives emerging from different social contexts to consider and flesh out how neoliberalism look across the school systems, how it challenges the systems differently, and how it evokes various responses from within the systems (Apple, 2001). Taken all the efforts together, a finely nuanced understanding of the trails of neoliberalism can help collectively re-discover school education as a social good, and collectively re-imagine and reshape alternatives for the future. Originality/value: This paper offers an international and comparative perspective and further nuances to an understanding of how neoliberal policies and ideology are recontextualized in countries across the globe given particularities of different local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning about political issues through the new core subject of Liberal Studies (LS) in senior secondary education in Hong Kong has become ‘socially problematic’ amid mounting concern of politicians and pundits who see a link between such learning and the recent waves of student protests. Using data from in-depth interviews with senior secondary students in Hong Kong, we explore how politically disengaged and engaged youth experienced their LS learning and how they perceived and made sense of the relationship between LS learning and political participation or its absence. Our findings indicate that while there appear to be circumstances that give rise to diversified learning experiences, LS has little bearing on youth political participation or otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the development of Basil Bernstein’s theoretical armories and reinvigorates its relevance to social class analysis in education, while identifying some of the challenges and promises in doing so. The main arguments are grounded in an empirical analysis of the recent Liberal Studies reform in Hong Kong’s senior secondary education. An extended discussion of using a Bernsteinian approach to pedagogy-specific class explanations is developed: (a) transition of code modalities between stages of education; (b) differentiated pedagogic identities in the middle class; (c) pedagogic grammars of specialized habituses; and (d) possibilities for an interruption in the process of social reproduction. It is concluded that continuing to build on Bernstein’s legacy will allow us to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the ways that class works through different pedagogic contexts in order for the conception of an interruption of class reproduction to be useful in guiding transformative practices in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]