Ideas about educational improvement are contextual and contested. This study proposes a critical and pragmatic framework to analyse systemic improvement, taking into account the paradoxes and limitations of quantitative sources. The study compared 83 subnational educational systems of three federal countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil,…

With early childhood inhabiting a firm position on policy agendas, an emerging global consensus acknowledges the need for research into early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems. However, standardised approaches to comparison dominate the field. These studies tend to be grounded in methodological nationalism, assuming nation states as the…

Standardised International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have gained prominence in global and national educational discussions. ILSAs claim to offer valuable insights for improving education systems, but their impact on educational policy varies and has become a contested arena. This article analyses how these assessments fed educational…

The aim of this article is to analyse the circulation of discourse in the global educational field and its relation to local-specific education policies and practices. The first section examines the logic of networks and relates it to the specificities of the networks of interaction that, it is argued, constitute "global policy spaces"…

To what degree are nations "rewriting" citizenship by expanding discussions of human rights, diversity and cultural pluralism in modern civic education, and what explains variation between countries? This study addresses these issues by analysing the intended content of civic education in Costa Rica and Argentina. Over time, civic…

Analyzes ways in which Latin American countries have addressed curricular regulation from the late 19th century to the present, focusing on education reforms during the 1990s in Argentina. Examines textbook policies over time and the tensions between recent decentralization policies and increasingly centralized educational assessment. (Contains 28…

Compares the strategies, procedures, and outcomes of educational reform under Argentina's military autocratic government (1976-83) and the civilian democratic government that followed (1983-93). Points out that the harsh change strategies employed by the military regime proved ineffective, even disastrous, but the participative strategies of the…