The traditional delivery system for public K-12 education in the U.S. is being disrupted by forces from without (e.g., forms of competition, including charter schools) and from within (e.g., new regulatory requirements, including meaningful teacher evaluation and the Common Core). As in any sizable sector of the economy, challenges to the status…

The aim of this article is to analyse the direct and indirect effects that PISA generates in the orientation of educational policies and reforms in Spain and the ways in which PISA data and results are used in political discourses, at both national and sub-national levels. The main hypothesis of the article is that PISA results have played a key…

Many nations have attempted to create different language-in-education policies that would cater not only to the needs of learners but also to the demands of preserving a country's native languages. The emergence of multilingual education has led to a proliferation of research that shows the benefits of using a learner's first language. These…

This article contends that teacher unions' participation in policy making during South Africa's political transition was characterised by assertion of ideological identity (unionism and professionalism) and the cultivation of policy networks and alliances. It is argued that, historically, while teacher unions were divided along political and…

In some settings, medium of instruction (MOI) policies in multilingual education break out into public debates in mass media involving politicians, business leaders, government officials, parents, and school children. These public discussions of MOI often index struggles over the distribution of political power and economic resources, and issues…

In this paper I embrace the thinking that writing on one's experiences in the use of qualitative educational research strategies and principles could potentially contribute to furthering knowledge in the field. In adopting an action research framework to guide collaborative work in a policy review exercise in Botswana, I found that collaborative…

This paper details how educational policy is developed in an educational authority in a political environment of a hung parliament. The paper begins by looking briefly at the difficulties facing educational policy rollout in Tasmania during the years 2000-2011, and then details how an educational policy dealing with school closures was reshaped in…

This study aims to explore the relationships between the third sector and the educational system in Israel in light of their current increasing involvement with one another. This was investigated along four stages of the policy process ranging from initial agenda-setting to final implementation. The stage of policy these relationships reached was…

This article explores feminist interventions in urban school politics. First, it argues that the female contribution was an essential component to politics and policy making in the 120-year period that London had a single education authority. Second, it suggests that these women politicians were advocates of a cultural praxis that involved…

At the start of their term, the Obama administration pledged to reform two failing policy systems in the United States: immigration and health care. The Latino populations' attitudes toward these two critical policy areas are particularly relevant due to the large foreign born population in the Latino community and the large number of Latinos who…

Taiwan is a multicultural and multilingual society. Generally speaking, Taiwanese residents fall into one of four ethnic groups. Each ethnic group has a different cultural context and a preferred language. Therefore, one's use of language may reveal his/her identification with an ethnic group, and language policy implementation may imply the power…

Many researchers studying the impact of parliamentary devolution conclude that education policies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are diverging. They attribute this to five factors: the redistribution of formal powers associated with devolution; differences in values, ideologies and policy discourses across the four territories;…

The significant cost of hosting the London 2012 Olympics is justified, in part, by claims that the games will inspire greater social cohesion, promote peace and encourage the public adoption of active healthy lifestyles. This critical review paper examines these justifications and finds them wanting. The first section provides a socio-historic…

Today, with states' near-universal adoption of the Common Core State Standards, the political system has achieved that which was not possible less than 2 decades ago. Just why this is so remains unanswered. Some observers have attributed states' embrace of the standards to the substantial financial incentives that the federal government embedded…

This dissertation is concerned with the idea of global policy transfer, as it has increasingly appeared in the literature of policy studies, and has been used to understand recent educational policy transformations around the world. To carry out this investigation, I have conducted a case study of higher education in Paraguay in order to determine…