Universities, and business schools specifically, are experiencing a transformation of their societal mission. Similar to the STEM fields, business schools are nested in global competitive environments facing multiple competing pressures, one being the need to demonstrate their social impact (SI). While business schools signal their commitment to…

A considerable scholarship now describes the increasing neoliberalization of universities and the accompanying impacts on academic research and researchers. However, less attention has been devoted to issues of research project leadership, especially for academics with feminist commitments. This article reports results of a qualitative study of 12…

Education reforms around the world have been powerfully shaped by the rise of the neoliberal political, economic and cultural agendas. Neoliberal policies (re)produce certain types of institutional processes such as managerialism, performativity, and competition. These elements are mediated in varied ways by national ideologies, societal needs and…

In many countries, teacher evaluation has been viewed as a policy lever to improve the quality of teaching and student achievement. Recent research suggests that teacher evaluation can also be implemented as a mechanism for professional growth with careful consideration of the organizational context. However, few studies have examined the way in…

Purpose: Shared understandings of curriculum reform within and between the levels of the educational system are suggested to be crucial for the reform to take root. The purpose of this paper is to explore variation in perceived curriculum coherence and school impact among state- and district-level stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach: The…

This book offers an original contribution to the area of international research on comparative education policies and the influence of transnational agencies on national school policy and reform. With a focus on grasping what "the Nordic model" or "the Nordic dimension" means in school and educational policy, the book explores…

This book identifies the cultural and moral foundations of country-specific educational governance and school leadership and presents the principles of justice and the diversity of common goods that guide leadership practices in schools. It contributes to an existing research field that studies diversity and ethical leadership in schools. The…

School reform in the past several decades has taken a "modernist" bent in that it has focused on quantitatively based accountability systems modeled after business (Ravitch, 2013; Tienken & Orlich, 2013). The author uses a model devised by a Finnish scholar to demonstrate that 1) these reforms are indeed modernist, and 2) the private…

This report focuses on systems thinking and its place in education transformation. It reflects on key published literature and on specific outputs from the Education Development Trust's own programme of research. The report offers an overview of the evolution of systems thinking and the relevance for policymakers and practitioners as they tackle…

Doctoral education as a policy field is an important link between educational, research and innovation policies. It is gaining importance in European and national policy discussions. Doctoral education policies are increasingly formulated at the supranational level, even though the European Commission does not possess formal competence in terms of…

Purpose: Increased school autonomy and accountability have been a common denominator of national reforms in otherwise heterogeneous governance systems in Europe and the USA. The paper argues that because schools serving disadvantaged communities (SSDCs) often have lower average performance, they are more often sanctioned or under closer scrutiny,…

In Europe, doctoral education systems have been systematically reformed. These reforms are aimed at improving the quality of research and the competitiveness of European countries. In Finland, the reform project of doctoral education started vigorously in the mid-1990s which has contributed significantly to the emergence of more structured…

This paper sets out the main findings of the International Instructional Systems Study (IISS), conducted by the UCL Institute of Education and funded by the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). The study examined the instructional systems and intended curricula of six "high performing" countries and two US states. The…

The last two decades have seen unprecedented interest in science curricula, with many governments seeing improvements in the performance of their school students in science as key to future economic prosperity. We present the results of an analysis of the curriculum documents for primary and secondary science in Australia (New South Wales and…

The study aims to gain a better understanding of the national large-scale curriculum process in terms of the used implementation strategies, the function of the reform, and the curriculum coherence perceived by the stakeholders accountable in constructing the national core curriculum in Finland. A large body of school reform literature has shown…