This article presents findings from an analysis of the American Federation for Children Network (AFC) policy network using tools from network ethnography and qualitative content analysis. Specifically, we examined tax forms and carried out extensive web searches to spatialize and map the AFC network, mined text from policy-actors in the AFC…

Despite the interest in governance transition in public education, it is challenging to find a theorised account of the process, and even more so in social democratic countries. To fill this gap, Israel can serve as a good case study for investigating how educational governance in social democratic countries changes under neoliberal influences. In…

The theory of a globally structured education agenda interrogates the political and economic systems that influence how states take on policy ideas. One way that globalizing processes may take place is through "network governance," or via networks of people, ideas, researchers, governments, non-governmental organizations, private…

Gert Biesta astutely criticizes the politics of learning through which learning has been popularized and exalted. He offers a valuable critical diagnostics of this politics, but, I argue, his conclusions about 'going beyond learning' incriminate learning wholesale. Through a close reading of one of Biesta's related articles, I show that he…

Policy debates about charter schools are often dominated by polarizing emotional narratives. However scholarly attention on narratives in education policy, and especially narratives about charter schools in local contexts, has been limited. The recently developed Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) approach offers guidelines to systematically study…

Discourses of 'teacher quality' have been on the rise in Australia since at least the standards-focused policy reforms of the 1990s. This paper uses a corpus-assisted analysis to explore recent deployments of 'teacher quality' and 'teaching quality' in the Australian print media, drawing on 432 articles collected from the 12 Australian national…

This paper on the political sociology of school choice policies has been written as a supplement to the essays in the 2020 Politics of Education Association Yearbook and locates them in cognate literatures. In addition, the papers are situated against the changing political and global contexts of such policies, as global pressures, discourses, and…

Prominent developments in English PE and school sport (PESS) policy across the period of Conservative-led governments since 2010 have not been empirically or comprehensively researched. In addressing this shortcoming, this study was uniquely underpinned by punctuated equilibrium theory in order to respond to long-standing difficulties of…

Taking England as our case study, this paper reviews secondary school environmental education from a policy perspective. By drawing on Stevenson's typologies for environmental improvement and Lucas' categorisation of environmental education, we analyse national policy documents, local authority and Multi-Academy Trust policies; and individual…

In April 2021, Idaho became the first state to pass a policy restricting teachers' discussion of race- or gender-related topics. Over the next two years, 17 more states followed suit and passed similar restrictions through state legislatures, state boards of education, state attorneys general, and executive orders. Using nationally representative…

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has recently been positioned as a serious problem requiring urgent policy response among partisan media outlets. Making a case for pressing policy demands, several policy makers have proposed federal, state, and local level legislation and other measures to restrict how race, racism, or American history in general can be…

The topic of this academic review is settler slogans that mandate colonial school policy in North America. Also discussed is Indigenous futurity as a strategy for transforming education and countering the educational harm that comes from weaponized language. Beginning in 1887, the US federal government authorized colonial schooling, using the…

Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot box. This paper uses a novel data set to explore how…

Prohibited concept laws have a chilling effect on teaching, resulting in the erasure of social justice topics; however, the extent to which district-level actors support such laws or the role they play in perpetuating the effect is unclear. I offer a framework for understanding how district-level policy messaging contributes to the chilling effect…

The OECD's PISA is seen as a 'global yardstick' against which countries measure the quality of their education systems. In 2018 PISA included an assessment of global competence. This paper starts with the premise that in using a single global instrument to 'measure' this phenomenon, PISA claims standardisation over contextually rich data that can…