This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations'…

This paper investigates how and why test-based accountability (TBA), a global model for education reform, began to dominate educational debates in Norway in the early 2000s, and how this policy has been operationalised and institutionalised over time. In examining the adoption and retention of TBA in Norway, we build on the cultural political…

In an era of expanding global educational privatization and shifting policies on how to fund educational facilities in many states in the US, this study engages the lenses of critical policy analysis and fiscal sociology to examine educational privatization in the school facilities industry in California. Employing critical policy document…

Educational policy depends on assumptions about fairness in education, whether they are made explicit or kept implicit. Without a view of fairness, one would be in the dark as to what should be done about the reproduction of social inequality through education, or whether or not anything should be done at all. The aim of this paper is to uncover…

Bourdieu's concept of field offers an alternative explanation for the inevitable gap between policy initiative and implementation. While the existing literature mostly concentrated on the dichotomy of macro- and micro-politics in enacting education policies, the missing attention to meso-level, local governments as policy interpreters and…

This analysis aims to measure the impact of school choice policy on secondary school students' enrolment patterns within the social geography of Vancouver, an increasingly polarized global city. The rationale for the study is to examine the impact of "education market" reforms on the socio-economic composition of schools in a Canadian…

What happens when neoliberalism as a structural and structuring force is taken up within institutions of higher education, and works upon academics in higher education individually? Employing a critical authoethnographic approach, this paper explores the way technologies of research performance management, specifically, work to produce academics…

Liberal egalitarians are rightly interested in the meaning and scope of educational justice. Much of this work involves developing an account of what the fair allocation of educational resources ought to look like under ideal conditions. However, recent developments in competitive global capitalism, including the protracted nature of the global…

Since 2009, the Swedish Government uses an "audit" agency--the Swedish Schools Inspectorate--to monitor and assess the accuracy with which teachers grade student responses on national tests. This study explores the introduction and subsequent establishment of the Inspectorate's regrading programme as an example of political management of…

This article considers the impact of the "Lau v. Nichols" Supreme Court decision on the education of English learners in Washington State, US In particular, we focus on the most popular educational program in the state, Sheltered English Instruction. We first examine how intertextual links to various policy texts and discourses shape…

In the United Kingdom (UK), Higher Education Institutions share with other educational providers the duty to provide reasonable adjustments for students who disclose disabilities. The role of academic administrators in the operationalisation of legislation-driven policy related to disability within the university context is overlooked within…

Given state cuts to US public education, overcrowding and underfunding in urban district schools continue to grow. Yet, how parents understand the role of state disinvestment on underfunded and overcrowded public schools remains relatively unexamined. Drawing from an ethnographic study of school choice in Arizona, I explore how a group of white…

A historical tension between a more general and a more specific focus in post-compulsory education is made visible in some educational systems by the division into more academic and more vocational programmes. Embedded in this tension are questions of social justice and the purposes of education. In addition, division into academic and vocational…

Through the examination of a collection of macro factors and explanations for racial disparities in mathematics assessment found in the literature, this article takes up these accounts and problematizes the factors by unpacking the assumptions and exposing complexities. We do this using Critical Race Theory (CRT) to reinterpret and call out…

Since 2002, British Columbia's education system has undergone extensive change following amendments to the "BC School Act" ("Bill 34"). This article presents a critical analysis of policy changes to the K-12 education finance system, particularly the expansion of the legal capacity of school districts to create "'school…