Teacher identity can serve as an important lens to examine the way teachers traverse the various demands made of them by policymakers and stakeholders in the school system, with their own perspectives of self and their work. Official narratives and curriculum documents lead to the construction of a public identity and what it means to be a 'good…

The New Education Policy (NEP), 2020, adopted by Government of India, envisages significant and far-reaching reforms in higher education sector in India. In this article, I foreground certain peculiar features of the process of massification of higher education in India, including privatisation and fragmentation. I locate the political economy of…

This paper presents a comprehensive review of existing literature concerning the domains of accreditation and quality assurance in various sectors. Accreditation and quality assurance play vital roles in ensuring the credibility, transparency, and effectiveness of educational institutions, healthcare facilities, industries, and other domains. This…

To improve teaching and learning outcomes, teachers and head teachers need whole-system support to build professionalism and enhance their practice. Roles at the middle tier of education systems, or those professionals working between the school and central level, offer unique capacities to facilitate collaboration, broker knowledge, scale…

To improve teaching and learning outcomes, teachers and head teachers need whole-system support to build professionalism and enhance their practice. Roles at the middle tier of education systems, or those professionals working between the school and central level, offer unique capacities to facilitate collaboration, broker knowledge, scale…

Teachers' work in India is impacted by the ongoing restructuring of school education that incorporates simultaneous attempts at reform and regulation. Child-friendly assessment policy instituted by the local bureaucracy leads to intensification of teachers' administrative roles, drawing their attention away from critical pedagogic ones.…

A major concern for policymakers around the world is how to design an entire system of education that provides high quality teaching and learning outcomes. This paper aims to make a significant contribution to this debate by looking closely at the middle part of education systems -- the regional, district, and sub-district level -- as a critical…

Mapping India's vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India's Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified…

The discourse around public education in recent times presents an abysmal picture of failing public schools delivering low levels of learning. The key constituent held responsible for this failure is the permanent teacher of government schools who is supposedly taking undue advantage of "high salaries" paid according to the…

This article brings together critical perspectives on a broad range of issues that emerge from a reading of the National Policy on Education 2016. The issues vary from accountability to transdisciplinarity and from the marginalization of transgender people to value education. Such a complex task of critiquing this policy document cannot be…

Education reforms, considering their significance, deserve better methods than mere "trial and error." This article conceptualizes a network of six anchors for education reforms: education policy, education system, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teacher education. It establishes the futility to reform anchors in isolation and…

This is a report of the Two-Day National Seminar on New Directions in Higher Education, organized by the Kerala State Higher Education Council on 12th and 13th July 2010. The objective of the seminar was to deliberate upon the reforms being undertaken by the Government of India in Higher Education. Reputed scholars from within and outside the…

There exist many actors within the realm of education policy planning and implementation, namely: the policy makers; the national, local and regional institutions engaged in the dissemination and interpretation of these policies; and the educational institutions that implement these policies at the ground level (schools). While schools are largely…

This paper reports on findings from a large sample survey in the states of India that account for two thirds of the children out of school. It then examines the feasibility of the central government's goals to ensure all children complete 5 years of school by 2007, and 8 years by 2010. These goals--more ambitious than the global EFA goals--are…

Whether to adopt national standards and tests has long been a subject of lively debate in the United States. With 47 states now participating in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, and a commitment from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to allocate hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to the development of common tests, the country is…