Drawing on a review of international higher education (IHE) policies, priorities, and literature from the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK over the course of a 16-year period (2000-2016), this article identifies a strong scholarly and policy preoccupation with the urgency of the global knowledge economy and cognate discourses of 'Asia Pacific…

This paper offers insights into the referencing of Singapore within the US Obama Administration educational discourse, underscoring the political-material-discursive nexus of international educational benchmarking. Using critical discourse analysis, we find that an objectified Singapore functions as a rhetorical tool of US policymaker agendas,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of critical policy analysis (CPA) in the fields of educational leadership and policy. In addition to exploring how CPA compares to traditional research approaches in educational leadership and policy, the authors consider the influence of long-established ways of knowing, why scholars choose…

Policy texts present problems, propose solutions to those problems and persuade multiple audiences of the legitimacy of the proposed problems and solutions. The rhetorical analysis of two decades of higher education and science and technology discourse in Finland, Germany, UK, Portugal and USA highlights the discursive elements that contribute to…

The promise of quality education is a cornerstone of American culture. Why, then, is this not the experience of every child in our nation? In the 1990s, the charter school movement began under the auspices of an avenue to address the disillusionment of education policy, the sense of powerlessness felt by parents and teachers, and the disparities…

Current changes affecting education systems have impacted teaching work as a whole. The concept of teachers' and establishments' effectiveness was introduced to operationalise an approach that is dominated by the cost-benefit model. This article uses this premise to suggest an analysis of the social value of teaching work, and more specifically…

Educational effectiveness research (EER) has accumulated much knowledge in the areas of school effectiveness research (SER), teacher effectiveness research (TER) and school/system improvement research (SSIR). Yet many schools and educational systems are not making enough use of the material and their insights. The article reviews evidence of…

The article "Getting lost in translation" by Harris, Chapman, Muijs and Reynolds addresses the engagement of policy-makers and educational practitioners with (the results of) educational effectiveness and improvement research. In this commentary the article is discussed from the perspectives of research utilisation, the solidity of the…

The agenda of "A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future," "commissioned," "funded," and "nurtured" by the U.S. Department of Education, is nothing less than an attempt to implement a "transformation" of America by "transform[ing] current academic norms about what counts as…

Stanford education professor Martin Carnoy examines four main critiques of how international test results are used in policymaking. Of particular interest are critiques of the policy analyses published by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Using average PISA scores as a comparative measure of student achievement is misleading…

Two scenarios are presented for the future of university-based teacher education programs. In one, the faculty either ignores or fights against the criticisms of these schools, resulting in the demise of schools of education. In the other scenario, schools of education lead the way in reforming their enterprise, leading to string and successful…

"Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy" argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as…

The Toxics Geography Exercise was developed as an application-oriented exercise to develop skills in critical analysis in groups of undergraduate students from widely diverse academic backgrounds. Students use publicly available data on industrial activities, history of toxic material disposal, basic chemistry, regulatory approaches of federal and…

With contributions from leading experts across disciplinary fields, this book explores best practices from the field's most notable researchers, as well as important historically based and politically focused challenges to a field whose impact has reached an important crossroads. The comprehensive and powerfully critical analysis considers the…

There are essentially two overlapping approaches to describe the state of the art of school leadership training and development in the US. The first approach is what I call recorded history. It is a factual documentation of milestone events, governance changes as well as the passage of landmark laws and policies. The second approach, hidden…