This article explores the erosion of public education as a project of democratization. It locates this erosion in the neoliberal world order that has redefined our understanding of schooling the democratic citizen in terms of developing market assets. In it, Carl Anders Säfström investigates specifically how this shift is apparent in the ways in…

We have used the concept of ethnography as explanatory critique in earlier research in three projects in Spain relating to teacher professional development and leadership for socially just schools. This research involved participant observations, interviews, informal conversations, document analysis and virtual ethnography. However, we have also…

Urban school districts' educational leaders face what seem to be an endless number of challenges, such as closing the achievement gap, enhancing student performance, building teacher capacity, creating leadership opportunities, and adapting to a student population that is changing rapidly and increasingly made up of students from low socioeconomic…

Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I…

The contribution deals critically with the issue of citizenship and children's rights, identifying a silent void starting from the change we have witnessed with the progressive questioning of the principles, secular, and religious, of adult authority and the sacrosanct affirmation rights of minors and their defence against violence and abuse. This…

In recent decades, medical education has been grappling with two significant challenges: the increasing prevalence of burnout among learners at all levels and the concerning trend of industry bias, low-quality evidence, and expert-based opinion driving clinical practice guidelines. To address these issues, a critical evaluation of the medical…

"Beyond Standards" highlights the structural conditions that have undermined the success of the standards movement and challenges us to confront them. The book offers an impassioned argument about the ways that our decentralized educational systems undermine the pursuit of educational equity and excellence. Morgan Polikoff applies a wide…

Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) has changed considerably over the past 40 years. This paper uses a personal memoir to trace the influences on PETE over the years. In particular, the memoir describes the early criticisms of PE as a university study and how such criticism spawned the development of what we now know as human movement…

Character Education in the UK is often considered controversial through its perceived neoliberal individualizing of character, disregarding of young people's moral agency, and blindness to the effect of social structures. This article presents an alternative framework for character educators, focussed on the biographical narratives of the students…

This paper explores how the twin processes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism work together on, and through, curricula and their associated pedagogies. It bridges the gap between policy and classroom practice, focusing on the particular example of the school subject of mathematics and the notion of mastery, operationalised in the English…

Research-based assessments (RBAs) measure how well a course achieves discipline-specific outcomes. Educators can use outcomes from RBAs to guide instructional choices and to request resources to implement and sustain instructional transformations. One challenge for using RBAs, however, is a lack of comparative data, particularly given the skew in…

It is clear that we have to do something in our time concerning global warming yet before we can actually change the world, we must first understand our world. According to Heidegger, technology itself is not good or bad, but the problem is, that technological thinking (calculative thinking) has become the only form of thinking. Heidegger saw that…

This collective article discusses the philosophy of modern higher education in Iran, which in this case, optimistically, its history dates back to the founding of "Dar al-fonun" (1851)--if we consider "Dar al-fonun" as a university. Otherwise, its origin can be traced back to the University of Tehran (established in 1934).…

The notion of decolonisation implies the existence of a territory, entity, structure, or system which has previously been colonised by exogenous forces and thus needs to be liberated. In most African countries, the discourses of decolonisation of higher education emanate from the shared experience of imposed European colonisation that perpetuated…

This paper is a response to Richard Niesche's recent JEAH paper claiming a 'theory turn' in educational leadership. Bringing Niesche's argument into conversation with recent work on social epistemology in the field, I argue that any claim for a theory turn is premature and arguably requires further nuancing of enduring issues. Framed around the…