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…

As postsecondary grantmaking foundations make sense of recent sociopolitical crises, including inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic; attention to the Movement for Black Lives following the summer 2020 uprisings; and more openly racialized politics, they have been catalyzed to reconsider their racial equity commitments. Grantmakers are…

Swedish compulsory schools are committed to work for equality and social cohesion. Increasing school segregation, however, challenges this commitment. Based on survey data from Swedish municipalities, this article maps and analyses local initiatives that counteract school segregation. We identify three main types of initiatives--reinforcement,…

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…

Closing equity gaps in student outcomes has been a key part of the national agenda in postsecondary education the last two decades as goals to increase the number of college graduates coincides with an increasing number, and future majority, of students from historically marginalized communities. Impactful support programs for students from…

As awareness of bias in educational machine learning applications increases, accountability for technologies and their impact on educational equality is becoming an increasingly important constituent of ethical conduct and accountability in education. This article critically examines the relationship between so-called algorithmic fairness and…

Public accountability through information disclosure is a pillar of modern education reform efforts. Despite the ubiquity of this approach, we argue that public accountability in education is undertheorized and often predictably unlikely to achieve its intended policy goals. Drawing on examples from an equity-oriented court case in California and…

The Aurora Institute has released state policy recommendations to enable our education system to transition from an industrial age "one-size-fits-all" model, to a future-focused model that supports education innovation, student agency, builds knowledge, and prioritizes mastery of skills and knowledge over seat time. The six identified…

The school system in England has undergone significant change following the introduction of the academies policy and the subsequent mass conversion of secondary schools to academies. In this article we address two issues arising from this process of academisation, namely equality of opportunity and local democratic accountability, both of which…

Competing societal and political values have historically facilitated shifts in the policies surrounding the goals of and the practices within Career and Technical Education (CTE). These values, however, are malleable and are developed in response to demands wrought by economic need. This review sheds light on how a confluence of societal and…

The article aims to depict the political framing of three grading reforms in Swedish compulsory school, in terms of the political problem they are supposed to solve and what kind of attention is given to the lowest performing pupils. Discourse analysis is employed, focusing on statement producers. The empirical material consists of policy…

This report provides research and practical advice on how boards of trustees can influence diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and policies. The report argues that boards must be strategically woven into the conversation in order to guide intentional changes to policies, practices, procedures, behaviors, and attitudes towards racial equity.

In Ontario, Canada, principals' work is guided by competencies outlined in the Ontario Leadership Framework which reflect the leadership skills and behaviours needed to successfully lead schools, improve student achievement and well-being. The problem is that this document largely ignores equity and anti-oppressive leadership behaviours. The…

Empirical policy analyses have hitherto largely focused on how formal institutions and agents (such as schools and ministries) formulate and enact policy. Less considered is the role and perspectives of families in mediating education policy. This paper discusses the importance of viewing families as not only policy subjects, but policy actors who…

Researchers have shown that school districts can leverage the significant changes made to federal and state accountability systems to achieve more equitable outcomes for all students (Burns et al., 2019; Dodman, 2019; Hyler et al., 2021) It is also known that classroom practitioners use their agency to support or stall district level initiatives…