Drawing on two multi-site ethnographic projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we explore how teachers in both public schools and schools for migrant children have responded to state policies that restrict educational opportunities for migrant students. We argue the importance of political context in re-conceptualising empowerment by raising the…

This paper outlines clear signs of market-led instrumentalisation for HE cultures in Britain, before critiquing the "ontological turn" in HE theory and its intrinsic political abdication from those signs. It focuses on a paper by Ronald Barnett to both diagnose the problem, which is a "precarité" that is ghosted in his work,…

This paper reflects on the history of adult and community education (ACE) in Aotearoa New Zealand with special reference to older people's learning. The paper adopts a critical framework and draws on both primary and secondary sources. Key economic, political, social, demographic and cultural forces are discussed along with the huge growth in…

This paper focuses on the role of governments in contemporary networked political configurations. Such networks constitute policy communities, usually based upon shared conceptions of social problems and their solutions. By enabling social, political, and economic connections at local, regional, national, and international levels, such networks…

Language policy and Linguistic Landscapes (LL) are a highly contested area in South Africa. Due to Apartheid, the education system constitutes the core of such contestation. In Post-Apartheid South Africa the new Constitution of 1996, the South African Schools Act (SASA) and recent political initiatives such as the Use of Official Languages Act of…

While there is growing attention to language as a central issue in education for refugees, this policy area still appears to be dominated by an apolitical, technical, and instrumentalist perspective. Through a comparison of language-in-education policies in two refugee camp contexts, Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and the refugee camps along the…

The public funding of early years education and care in England has been transformed. Historically, local councils had the main responsibility for decisions regarding nursery education and child day care, but in 1996 the Conservative government introduced a nursery education voucher scheme. Parents of four-year-olds could exchange the voucher for…

This article presents a comparative analysis of a metasynthesis of Israeli and US studies on parental choice of two-way bilingual education. My analysis reveals that the reasons majority-language and minority-language parents expressed in the US and Israeli studies converge in some aspects but, significantly, also diverge. I argue that the…

The theories and approaches of steering/monitoring a process of change within education systems have evolved over the last 20 years or so as a result of many factors such as globalisation and decentralisation, a faster pace of change, increasing expectations and demands from various stakeholders (parents, employers, teacher unions, etc.) and the…

The narrative in this chapter runs as follows. As the political, social, and economic environments that surround the American high school undergo seismic shifts, they create new forms of secondary education. We report that the environmental conditions between 1890 and 1920 were such that most of the pillars that anchored the American high school…

This study utilizes social network visualization and content analysis of policy reports to explore the changing structure and function of a network of organizations, including government agencies, philanthropies, think tanks, advocacy groups, research centers, and edu-businesses active in school discipline policy formation at the federal level…

This article shows the intersections of right-wing conservative discourse and evangelical religious proselytism in shaping right-wing populist discourse in Brazil and its implications on the education policy in the last decade. Since re-democratisation in the 1980s, the policy path sought to guarantee progressive and inclusive public education,…

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has long been considered a global policy in language education. It has been borrowed and adopted by different polities across the world. However, it is still not clear why the CEFR, intended for European usage, has become a ubiquitous tool for overhauling the quality of teaching and…

The Further Education (FE) sector has been considered by successive UK governments as significant to developing a global competitive edge as well as enhancing social justice. Consequently, these governments have shown keen interests in the sector and have introduced reforms and policy initiatives that have led to cultures of marketisation,…

As state and federal policymakers continue to adopt more centralized policies, it is increasingly important to understand how policies, particularly those designed to enhance education for underserved students, are implemented locally. We employ a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design to investigate the implementation of one policy, that…