In "Deliberative Policymaking," Elizabeth Grant advances a fresh framework for making collective decisions about US schools. Grant argues that education policy itself can be made fundamentally better by improving education policymaking methods. Informed by accounts of recent policymaking actions as well as her own considerable experience…

This policy-interested South Australian public education case study problematises how the Chief Executive (CE) and members of the Education Department's Senior Executive Group (SEG) understood system and school improvement from 2018 to 2022. We applied Carol Bacchi's, "What's the Problem Represented to be?"(WPR) policy analysis framework…

This article argues that the last three decades of school improvement policies have progressively limited the places and arguments created for arts education in public schools. The result has been a steady marginalization of the arts in the work of school improvement, an exacerbation of opportunity gaps related to access to arts education, and a…

This study expands on our previous research focusing on provincial educational policies to support students' academic resilience during the pandemic, with the current focus being on the "recovery phase" of the pandemic (January 2022 to December 2023). Our analysis identified 46 provincial documents that addressed one or more of the three…

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local…

Quantitative measures in mathematics education have informed policies and practices for over a century. Thus, it is critical that such measures in mathematics education have sufficient validity evidence to improve mathematics experiences for students. This article provides a systematic review of the validity evidence related to measures used in…

The Careers Hubs pilot (2018-2020) tested a place-based network model designed to facilitate English schools and colleges delivering career guidance, measured primarily by adherence to eight benchmarks of good practice. Using a standardised measurement tool, career guidance in hub schools was observed to improve faster than a matched comparison…

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'…

Contemporary educational reforms emphasise school autonomy, performance-based management, and accountability as necessary policies for attaining improvement goals. Despite their widespread adoption, the configuration and enactment of these policies are discretionary and contingent, deeply influenced by the interaction of local contexts,…

School-choice policies are expected to generate healthy competition between schools, leading to improvements in school quality and better outcomes for students. However, the empirical literature testing this assumption yields mixed findings. This systematic review and meta-analysis tests this theory by synthesizing the empirical literature on the…

Higher education quality and standards are rarely far from the headlines or ministerial speeches. This Policy Note considers the important -- and changing -- role of England's governing bodies in academic governance, as they are expected to provide increased assurance that standards are being maintained or enhanced. The author suggests some…

Research has extensively linked teacher collaborative work with opportunities for both explicit and implicit professional development. However, while teachers work together more often than before, little is known about how workplace collaborative contexts are structured in terms of who and how frames the problems of practice. Drawing on an…

In "Getting Education Right," Rick Hess and Mike McShane argue that America has too long suffered from the absence of a robust, coherent, and principled conservative vision for educational improvement. The book both diagnoses a problem and offers a solution. The problem? The right has too narrowly focused on school choice, campus speech,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the presence of continuous improvement and improvement science in the Consolidated State Plans required by ESSA. Through an exploratory qualitative content analysis, we examined 52 state plans to determine the extent education policies encourage professional educators to use a continuous improvement and…

Ideas about educational improvement are contextual and contested. This study proposes a critical and pragmatic framework to analyse systemic improvement, taking into account the paradoxes and limitations of quantitative sources. The study compared 83 subnational educational systems of three federal countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil,…