This paper uses critical policy analysis to investigate how the concept of equity has been co-opted to promote a neoliberal agenda in education reforms in Manitoba. Early provincial reform documents contained a narrow definition of equity focused primarily on closing achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. These reform…

Neo-liberal reforms in education have been sweeping the globe, undermining education as a public good, and diminishing its contributions to democratic life. Using post-structural perspectives, this article provides a critical discourse analysis of a proposed legislative bill in the province of Manitoba, Canada, as it relates to the construction of…

Compulsory school attendance policies establish a school entry age and a school leaving age for students. In 1916, the Province of Manitoba introduced a compulsory attendance law that mandated students attend school from the age of 7 to the age of 14. Fifty years later, further amendments were made to the school leaving age, but the school entry…

This article examines how recent policy reforms in Nova Scotia, Canada, encouraged and constrained distributed leadership in the provincial public education system. The study found the language of newly enacted legislation and policies encouraged distributed leadership by endorsing collaborative team processes for school improvement and special…

This article looks at fifty years' worth (1970-2020) of public K-12 education expenditure data from the Canadian province of British Columbia. It asks if spending has increased or decreased in this period and examines the causes and correlates of spending changes. Previous research has tended to assume that spending has decreased during this…

The enactment of the Education Modernization Act by the government of Manitoba in early 2021 proposed several structural changes to the governance and delivery of provincial education. The related documents had a strong emphasis on improving the achievement of all students, making them future-ready and strengthening parental involvement. But…

This article aims to show the value of the concept of policy trajectory to compare, from a long-term perspective, the transformations of education policies in the context of globalisation. After discussing the scope and limitations of the analyses of the concept in the literature -- descriptive, sequential, metaphorical and building on the works…

This paper deals with foreign experience of implementing inclusive education for children with special educational needs in the United States and Canada. Legal documents on inclusive education in foreign countries have been analyzed. The most relevant topic of American and Canadian scholars' researches on reforming special education is related to…

This article examines how school trustees (i.e., elected school-board members) conceive of their own leadership role and work with other levels of leadership within school districts. In a mixed-method study, a total of 121 school trustees were surveyed and 12 were interviewed across Ontario. A framework is proposed to better understand the tension…

The paper examines the role of PISA in the globalisation of education policies. It approaches the question by assessing the effects of PISA on the ways in which new legislation was debated in national contexts in the period 1994-2013. The study asks: Has there been an increase in the number of references to the international community in debates…

Ontario's colleges are committed to providing students of all backgrounds with a rewarding postsecondary experience that prepares them for long-term success in their careers. In recent years, colleges have expanded their global outreach as greater numbers of international students enrol in Ontario. The province is a recognized world leader in…

This study examined claims that teachers' years of teaching experience correlate to teachers' effectiveness. The assumed experience-effectiveness relationship was used to support the Government of Ontario, Canada's policy decisions concerning teacher hiring practices. This study critically examined sources cited in the policy report and reviewed…

The Accepting Schools Act (Bill 13), which amends the Education Act of Ontario, Canada, passed in 2012 includes the directive that all publicly-funded schools, whether secular or Catholic, support students who wish to establish, name, and run gay-straight alliances (GSAs). This legislation was influenced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and…

In 2002, jurisdictions across Canada began adding two new protected grounds to their human rights laws: gender identity and/or gender expression. Gender identity protections generally apply only to transgender people, whereas gender expression protections "may apply" to all Canadians in places like K-12 schools. However, it remains…

With this paper, I explore societal and institutional support for Chinese Heritage Language (HL) education through specific HL policies and practices in British Columbia (BC). Framed by power relations and societal attitudes, the paper intends to contextualize historical and contemporary marginalization enacted through HL-related legislatives,…