The task of creating a public will is daunting in any political system, but a democracy dedicated to the principles of participation and public deliberation faces specific challenges, including overcoming organized opposition that may not accept democratic tenets. In the sphere of education (and social reproduction more generally),…

Last spring's sudden shift to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted K-12 education in an unprecedented way. Upon Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's waiver of federally mandated state testing for spring 2020, it also triggered the first nationwide break in state testing in half a century. With students returning to school…

Kindergarten in the United States has fundamentally changed. It is the new first grade where children are taught increased academic content and experience more standardized testing. There is much debate among education stakeholders about these changes, but such discussions are often siloed-- making it difficult to know whether these changes…

In recent decades, the governance of educational systems has experienced dramatic changes in many countries. Schools have been given more autonomy whilst being held increasingly accountable at the central level through standardized testing and other forms of external evaluation. The mechanisms of performance-based accountability (PBA) and the…

Drawing upon the results of two nationally representative surveys, this report sums up 10 broad K-12 trends in 10 accompanying charts. The surveys were conducted as educators continued to grapple with the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the debates that sometimes draw education policies into the culture wars surrounding social and…

This column is a review of three areas of interest to Texas ELAR educators: the ELAR/SLAR TEKS revision, recent news from the Texas Education Agency, and the status of several bills relating to assessment. Included is a summary of the past two years of the ELAR/SLAR TEKS revision process and information about next steps in that process.

Policies that require the use of information about student achievement to evaluate teacher performance are becoming increasingly common across the United States, but there is some question as to how or whether to use student test-based teacher evaluations when student assessments change. We bring empirical evidence to bear on this issue.…

This paper analyses, from the perspective of the political sociology of policy instruments, the adoption and re-contextualisation of School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) reforms in Spain, with a particular focus on the region of Madrid. Over the last few decades, Madrid has adopted a wide range of education policies that have contributed to…

In the early twentieth century in the United States, Roman Catholic schools grew in number and became increasingly regulated by state departments of education. This led to the increased influence of public school reform movements in Catholic schools. Some Catholic educators questioned these movements, while others embraced them. Educational…

In the context of educational globalisation, the role of supranational organisations in shaping the educational policy decisions, especially of aid-dependent countries, has increased. Using global governance as a theoretical framework and Critical Policy Sociology (CPS) as a methodological framework, this paper analysed key educational policy…

Standardized assessments long have played a role in public education. For much of that time, they have been faulted as too time-consuming, too restrictive, and too removed from real teaching and learning. The shift to new standards and assessments turns the page on this. Illinois put in place the new Illinois Learning Standards to make clear what…

Believe and Prepare is a teacher preparation reform implemented by the Louisiana Department of Education in collaboration with school systems and teacher preparation programs across the state. It was piloted in the 2014/15 school year and became mandatory in July 2018 for incoming teacher candidates in all 18 institutions of higher education that…

Believe and Prepare is a teacher preparation reform implemented by the Louisiana Department of Education in collaboration with school systems and teacher preparation programs across the state. It was piloted in the 2014/15 school year and became mandatory in July 2018 for incoming teacher candidates in all 18 institutions of higher education that…

The full study to these appendixes used administrative records on undergraduate teacher candidates provided by the Louisiana Department of Education to compare the outcomes between similar teachers who completed programs that had implemented Believe and Prepare and teachers who completed programs that had not implemented it. This document presents…

This paper examines contestations over the value of Literature in the secondary school curriculum in the former British colony of Singapore and the way the Literature curriculum has been framed to understand the various issues surrounding the role of Literature education. Using Raymond Williams' framework of dominant, residual and emergent…