This article proposes a framework for thinking about the ghostly, thus arguing that policy can be understood as a landscape of intersecting and colliding temporalities from which arouse curious workings of barely-there forces, spooky energies and vibrating saturations of affective ambivalences. I present an empirical study of a policy agenda of…

This article presents a Foucauldian analysis of the political rationalities of national testing and accountability practices in Australia, and their inconsistencies for students for whom English is a second or additional language. It focuses on a problem associated with the statistical data category "Language Background Other Than…

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so "drenched in the past," the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt…

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…

This analysis involves an investigation of the corporate control of food in relation to low income and culturally dominated schoolchildren in cities. This includes an exploration of the problem as expressed globally and historically in relation to transnational policy networks. Since corporate growth always necessitates controlling the direction…

In 1987, the government of Ghana embarked on a process to decentralise education management to districts as part of wider social and democratic governance reforms. A central part of this reform was the prescription of active community participation in the affairs of schools within their locality. This paper explores the different meanings…

Many researchers studying the impact of parliamentary devolution conclude that education policies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are diverging. They attribute this to five factors: the redistribution of formal powers associated with devolution; differences in values, ideologies and policy discourses across the four territories;…

Accountability is one of the most advocated and controversial topics in US education. Since the early 2000s, the federal government has produced a vibrant discourse on accountability, which emphasizes quality, efficiency, and equal opportunity in education. As part of the larger phenomenon of new managerialism, the dominant forms of accountability…

The proliferation of policy think tanks and more broadly the rise of "policy networks" can be viewed as indicative of important global transformations in the nature of the state. That is, the emergence of new state modalities, with a shift away from government towards forms of polycentric governance, where policy is produced through…

Discusses nature of professional identity, focusing on teachers and nurses, and articulates view of "professional" as "caught between an 'economy of performance' and various 'ecologies of practice'." Rejects over-simplified understanding of "professional" identity and advocates embracing "ambivalence and…

To understand Belgian educational policy, one must consider Belgium's ongoing transition to a federal state. Belgium has been a polarized society, divided into Catholic organizations defending religious schools and Socialist and Liberal organizations promoting neutral education. Since assuming responsibility for educational policy in 1989, each…

The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world1

Discusses the recent New Right educational "reforms" in New Zealand within the context of the welfare state crisis. Details the development of conservative privatization and deregulation policies and the individualistic economic and social principles dominating the educational restructuring movement. Such trends impoverish the notion of…

Analyzes creation and implementation of Hong Kong's Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC), an education reform effort, in light of the country's transition to Chinese rule in 1997. Examines TOC's origins, its nature, means of implementation, and its impact. Discusses tension between "policy intent" and "policy actions," and…

Clarifies the concept of globalization and explores how globalization affects national education systems. Compares eight mechanisms of external effects (borrowing, learning, teaching, harmonization, dissemination, standardization, interdependence, and imposition) and organizations associated with them. Effects have been largely indirect, the…