"Because Democracy Is Difficult and Dangerous" is an excerpt from "Woke Is Not Enough: School Reform for Leaders with Justice in Mind" (2022). Each chapter of the book focuses on a domain of school reform relevant to school leadership today: racial justice, democratic governance, restorative justice, student activism, and…

Education reforms are rarely successful or free of controversies. However, efforts to "STEM-ify" public education in the USA by positioning education in STEM fields and training of future workforce as the central purposes of public schooling is proving to be remarkably successful and devoid of contention. This paper explains the success…

In the entrepreneurial university, epistemic governance is exerted through external pressures of market competition, funding, university rankings and research assessment and internal processes of organisational restructuring and mechanisms of corporate governance to re/produce epistemic injustices. Data from a study of three Australian…

Neo-liberal higher education is preoccupied with the future, with study increasingly viewed as being important for and in the future, rather than valuable in the present. We argue that a preoccupation with the future itself has become the generator of the present as precarious. Paradoxically, the certainty of future transformation or change, forms…

This article examines the policy construction of leadership at all levels in Scottish education. In the current reforms 'leadership at all levels' is being used to mobilise support around changes to the role of the headteacher and of the local authorities (LAs) to bring about greater system alignment. From a critical policy analysis six themes are…

This article presents a critical policy historiography of how Early School Leaving has been understood as a social problem and what policy responses have been enacted to tackle it in the Italian context, devoting a specific attention to the analysis of the translation of EU policy ideas, tools and recipes to reduce ESL. It shows how the…

Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and…

The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England,…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

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…

Germany has only recently started to discuss the possible contribution, on a conceptual basis, of post-colonial theory to development education. Drawing on key policy papers, this article explores how post-colonial and antiracist critiques of German development education have changed the field in the past decade. It first provides the history of…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

This paper discusses the significance of international and transnational developments for education policy research, with a focus on the European Union. The rise of policy projects at the EU level since 2000, has altered the relationships between the state, EU institutions and education policy, in terms of the definition of values, purposes, and…

This volume argues for the need of a common ground that bridges leadership studies, curriculum theory, and Didaktik. It proposes a non-affirmative education theory and its core concepts along with discursive institutionalism as an analytical tool to bridge these fields. It concludes with implications of its coherent theoretical framing for future…

This paper examines the re-articulation of social justice as equity in schooling policy through national and global testing and data infrastructures. It focuses on the Australian National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse the discursive reconstitution…