This paper explores the repositioning of state curriculum agencies in response to the establishment of the Australian Curriculum and the key national policy organisation responsible for its development: the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). I begin with an analysis of the federal Labor government's role in the…

Central to this article is a case study of one particular governmental instrument in Flanders, the educational magazine "Klasse voor Ouders" (Klasse for Parents). This popular magazine aims to provide information for and communication with parents as one of the target groups in the educational field. Despite the claimed formal and…

This study examines one of the most notable manifestations of Japanese education's incorporation into the global education restructuring movement: the 2007 reintroduction of national academic achievement testing ("zenkoku gakuryoku gakushuu joukyou chousa"). In so doing, I aim to untangle the complex intermingling of national and global…

This paper establishes and explains the important role of the Conservative Government of 1959-1964 in supporting the raising of the school leaving age in Britain from the age of 15 to 16. This was a significant and high-profile national issue that generated much educational, social and political debate around conflicting priorities during this…

Over the last almost two decades, high-stakes testing has become increasingly central to New York's schools. In the 1990s, the State Department of Education began requiring that secondary students pass five standardized exams to graduate. In 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act required students in grades three through eight to take math and…

This article addresses constructions and redefinitions of teacher professionalism by focusing on the discursive negotiations between the government and the teachers' union in Norway. Based on an examination of three white papers on teacher education from the past 15 years and policy documents put forth by the Union of Education Norway during the…

This article addresses the politics and policy-making of alternative forms of basic education in the context of EFA, with an emphasis on non-formal education (NFE) for school-age children. It explores how policy-makers interpret the relevance of such alternatives, the steps that are taken to implement the reforms and factors that play a role in…

This paper examines the Australian government's Indigenous policy by interrogating the concept of partnership between governments and Indigenous communities through three examples. Increasingly, the Australian federal government is focusing attention on the poor literacy and numeracy outcomes for Indigenous children in remote and very remote…

There is growing concern that almost 20 years after the 1988 Education Act, top-down, large-scale reform has stalled. The policy mix of choice, competition, markets, regulation, accountability and leadership seems not to have closed the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged areas and individuals, while most variations in school performance can…

While there has been considerable scholarship on the role of school and district leadership within instructional change, there has been little analysis of the values and orientations that undergird current policy debates about instructional leadership. This article outlines the importance of examining instructional leadership in the context of…

School curriculum policy and politics in South Africa are discussed in this article as a means of highlighting the nature of Governmental power and functioning in a post-liberation developing country. The notion "policy networks" is used as a lens to understand the ways in which specific constellations of policy interests informed the…