Beginning in 2010, more than 40 states adopted the Common Core State Standards. In the years immediately following their adoption, educators, parents, and policymakers familiar with the standards strongly supported them. Both Republicans and Democrats heralded the Common Core as one of the most promising school reforms in decades. Fast forward to…

This paper focuses on the Conservative-Liberal coalition government's policy in teacher education in England and its implications for the work of teacher educators. It does this by considering, for example, policy documents and the speeches of key politicians responsible for policy formulation. It argues that policies influenced by the neoliberal…

This article examines the recent developments and changes concerning Iranian music education from the constitutional revolution of 1905 to 2014. This concentrates on the five major chronological events referred to as Nationalism, Modernism, Conservatism, Neo-Traditionalism (Shirin-navazi) and Revivalism of the Traditions. This provides a source of…

The purpose of this article is to examine recent changes in the geography national curriculum in South Korea through the lenses of three curriculum components that often find themselves in competition--subject content, educational processes and national/social purposes. In recent years, the prevailing national and social aims outlined for the…

Foundations are the forces that influence the minds of curriculum developers, which affect the content and structure of the curriculum. These forces are beliefs and orientations as well as conceptions of learning and the needs of society. Foundation of curriculum is rooted with the foundation of education. Historically, modern curriculum and…

The articles in this special issue examine the increasingly complex relationship between segregation, desegregation, and integration in a sociopolitical environment vastly different from that of the initial days of desegregation. These issues are examined from historical and political perspectives, contextualizing the complexities of segregation,…

Literacy practices and sociocultural contexts have greatly defined and influenced each other. The role language plays in mobilizing both revolution and progress is well delineated in Congchao Hua's article comparing language learning curriculum in China over three decades, from the 1970s to the 2000s. The universality of the social and political…

This article develops a framework for investigating research use, using an "advocacy coalition framework" and the concepts of a "supply side" (mainly organizations) and "demand side" (policymakers). Drawing on interview data and documents from New Orleans about the charter school reforms that have developed there…

Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the way it is conceived and financed is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political--social construct, subject to various political forces, primarily interpreted through the prism of the state.…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT) are part of a widely heralded and visible change effort, providing a powerful force--replete with evidence, logic, money, and voice--that is changing public schooling away from locally run and state-subsidized, into a federal-state-controlled enterprise. The article begins by situating the…

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…

Caught between extraordinary public expectations and relatively modest constitutional authority, U.S. presidents historically have fashioned all sorts of mechanisms--executive orders, proclamations, memoranda--by which to move their objectives forward. William Howell asserts that under President Barack Obama's administration, presidential…

This article examines a case of what Olssen et al. (2004) call "managerial oppression" set in a faculty of international studies of a Japanese university. Japanese universities have, in recent times, been facing the financial pressures of a falling birthrate and dwindling enrolments. To remain solvent, some universities have had to…

This article reviews the literature on Chinese principalship written in English and Chinese between 1998 and 2008. The first sections discuss the rationale for the research, the review process, and the state of education research in mainland China. The review findings are presented as a set of core patterns and contributory subpatterns, which flow…

This research aims to explore the development of private higher education and related policy changes in China in the light of Foucault's notion of governmentality in neoliberal China. Essentially it is a synthesis of macro-level and micro-level analysis. The researcher examines policy development in combination with wide social, political and…