I grew up on free school meals and now work as a school improvement adviser. In this article, I address discontinuities within my 'support and challenge' role, a role that can be constrained by educational policy enacted within a performative and panoptic culture of fear. Successive governments have concerned themselves with promoting equity…

The Australian "National Indigenous Reform Agreement" (Closing the Gap) aims to address inequalities in various aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' lives. Scholars have repeatedly critiqued its failure to tackle structural inequalities. The agreement was revised in 2020. The current study adopts Carol Bacchi's…

Worldwide, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has emerged as a valid and reliable benchmark for assessing students' performance and for gaining significant influence over educational policy and decision-making. Since 2001, Qatar has engaged in massive educational reform, with high expectations for improving students'…

In 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic led to nationwide school closures, followed by a mandate for schools to reopen in 2020, posing challenges for ensuring both educational continuity and student safety. This paper presents findings from a mixed-method study involving ten campus principals in District A, South Texas, post-pandemic. Qualitatively, the…

Federal education policy has been a feature of the United States' education system beginning in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson introduced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as part of his "War on Poverty." Since then, the ESEA has undergone numerous revisions with each successive presidential administration. Part of the policy…

In 2022, the Center published "Student/Learning Supports: A Brief Guide for Moving in New Directions. The guide discussed the need for system changes to end the fragmentation, overspecialization, and marginalization of student/learning supports and outlined first steps to take in pursuing the changes. As the 2022 guide emphasizes,…

The aim of this paper is to increase transparency in the scientific analysis of equity gaps in education. This should be useful in avoiding common ambiguities and misunderstandings in the discourse and in presenting the analyses results in a constructive way. We focused on a very basic aspect of transparency: Information availability. We…

This paper critically analyzes gap discourses in student learning, starting from the achievement gap, education debt, and opportunity gaps, applying the lens of coloniality, racial-capitalism, and modernity (CRCM). Gap discourses are the prevalent rationale behind educational policies and school reforms globally. Specifically in the United States,…

The Australian governments' centrepiece Indigenous strategy, the 'Closing the Gap' framework, established in 2008 to address systemic Indigenous disadvantage, is underpinned by the concept of 'school readiness', which expects Indigenous families to bring their children to school ready to learn. The education system commonly blames Indigenous…

This research study focused on the intersection of three important aspects of public education--district policy, school-level leadership, and racial achievement gaps. The study examined the influence of school-level leadership in the implementation of a specific, district-wide policy designed to reduce racial achievement gaps through changes in…

To secure the economic well-being of our country in the current global society, we must be concerned with all students, and all means all. This qualitative research study asserts the need to stop focusing on the achievement gap and work to close opportunity gaps through equitable school practices. This narrative inquiry study critically analyzed…

Purpose: This article is a critical analysis of educational leadership and administration's historically privileged Eurocentric epistemologies, research methodologies, and intellectual norms, shaping the field through conceptions of "coloniality." The purpose of this article is toward decolonizing educational leadership. Problem:…

Prior to the United States' (U.S.) illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom government in 1893 and illegal annexation in 1898, literacy rates and educational attainment in the Hawaiian Kingdom were amongst the highest in the world. In contrast to the educational history of the 19th century, the usurpation of the Hawaiian educational system…

An opportunity gap exists in the United States school system where students of color score lower on standardized tests and have fewer opportunities than their white counterparts. Culturally Relevant Education (CRE) theory attempts to close this gap, and is defined by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) as Pedagogy that rests on three criteria or…

Teacher performance pay is often introduced with the goal of reducing gaps in test scores across groups, yet little is known about how well they achieve this aim. We ask, "Do test score-based teacher incentives impact the Black-White test score gap?" Using student-teacher matched data and a difference-in-differences approach in which the…