Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of critical policy analysis (CPA) in the fields of educational leadership and policy. In addition to exploring how CPA compares to traditional research approaches in educational leadership and policy, the authors consider the influence of long-established ways of knowing, why scholars choose…

In this article, Edward Janak shares his experience with Educational Foundations for the past thirty years. It spans from being an undergraduate pre-service educator in the 1980s, to being a master's degree student and a doctoral student in Educational Foundations from the 1990s and early 2000s, to being a full-time faculty member in Educational…

The concept "language legitimacy", which entails issues of social class, ethnicity and culture as well as those of dominance and power, is a very important one with implications for both educational policy and practice. This article begins with a brief discussion of the two major ways in which the concept of "language…

This paper investigates the impact of changing science policy doctrines on the development of an academic field, working life research. Working life research is an interdisciplinary field of study in which researchers and stakeholders collaborated to produce relevant knowledge. The development of the field, we argue, was both facilitated and…

As federal legislation requires that English language proficiency (ELP) standards are aligned with content standards, this article addresses issues and concerns in aligning ELP standards with content standards in English language arts, mathematics, and science. It starts with a brief description of federal legislation for alignment between ELP…

Since 2010, the number of urban Chinese high-school students applying to US universities has rapidly grown. Many of these students have chosen emerging international curriculum programs established by elite public high schools in China. These programs prepare wealthy Chinese students for the US college application process by exposing them to an…

The purpose of this article is to identify doctoral administration and education standards, practices, policies, and related gaps in knowledge, and consider them in the context of persistent social work challenges. A literature review was conducted, and focus groups were convened at the 2016 conference of the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral…

This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the (unintended) limitations and exclusive regimes of thought that have resulted. We argue that the theory's…

The activities of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and the yearly European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) are mainly organised in standing networks. Through the example of the Policy Studies and Politics of Education network, this article takes a closer look at network activity and the ways in which it contributes to…

In this article, global and other university rankings are critically assessed with regard to their unintended side effects and their impacts on the European and national landscape of universities, as well as on individual institutions. An emphasis is put on the effects of ranking logics rather than on criticising their methodology. Nevertheless,…

This chapter offers a pedagogical, analytical and heuristic framework for the critical analysis of higher education policy texts, and of the processes and motivations behind their articulations, grounded in considerations of relationships and flows between language, power and discourse. Theoretically the framework draws on critical discourse…

This article examines the increasing postcolonial and decolonising literature as it relates to non-Western countries and the history of their educational systems undergoing internationalisation and globalisation. The first section reviews a number of historiographical developments in the twentieth century that laid a foundation for a more cultural…

In this article, we provide a critical explanation and critique of neoliberalism. We attempt an innovative focus ranging from the wider contemporary political and ideological shifts, to the way in which neoliberal policy specifically influences higher education and the consequences thereof. We follow a narrative logic in three parts where we first…

This paper considers the policy "roles" adopted by teachers enacting policy in a department. It draws on a longitudinal study of two secondary mathematics departments endeavouring to make deep change aligned with a demanding curriculum policy. The study validates aspects of an existing typology, demonstrates the existence of a variety of…

This article explores student empowerment in a restructured urban Title I middle school. The study includes data from eight participants in an action research project that involved a critical inquiry unit in an eighth-grade language arts class that asked students, "How are you empowered and disempowered by school?" Findings reveal that…