Homeschooling is legal and growing in many countries but is virtually forbidden by law in Germany and a few others. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has reviewed and upheld this ban. Is home education a human right? How do these courts employ their jurisprudence of proportionality to find banning home education does not violate relevant…

This study examines the Korean Government's policy scheme of setting up the World-Class University (WCU) Project by investigating the perceptions of major actors, including WCU scholars and government officials. In-depth interviews were held with 18 WCU scholars and three government officials. Our findings suggest that the limits of the…

Whereas the previous government, regarding education primarily as a means to an end, showed little interest in questions of curriculum content, Gove's counter-revolution involves the enforcement of a deeply authoritarian politics of knowledge. An adequate response to such cultural and curricular conservatism needs to expose the falsity of Gove's…

"FORUM" has marked the progress of the Cambridge Primary Review by three previous articles from Robin Alexander, the Review's director, and by critiques and responses from several others, notably "FORUM"'s Michael Armstrong. In 2013 the Review was superseded by the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, and this article is the text of…

During the last three decades in Iran, the government has had different policies on the privatization of education. After victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the new government closed all private schools for nearly a decade. Establishing and reopening Non-Governmental Schools (NGS) was the first action toward the privatization of education…

This paper studies transformations in the role of higher education in Russia as represented in official Soviet and post-Soviet policy documents between the 1950s and 2013. The focus is on the categories defining the purposes and tasks of higher education in the larger context of society and economy. There is a basic dichotomy in relation to the…

Academic work-based learning (WBL) has an over a century-long history in Nigeria. The current WBL programs are the Students' Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) and the Graduate Internship (GI). They are sponsored by the federal government with the aim to improve employment outcomes. However, there is still a gross mismatch between the…

This commentary article explores one of the most important philosophical problems underlying the inequality of school achievement. If the inequality of school achievement is to be adequately addressed then it must begin with causes. The widely accepted conceptual framework within which the problem and its solutions are framed is the within/beyond…

In this article I reflexively explore my recent experiences as a Métis environmental activist, educator, and academic with the historic rise of the New Democratic Party in Alberta, Canada which was quickly followed by the victory of the federal Liberal Party, toppling conservative dynasties at both levels. This autoethnograhic inquiry also…

This paper accepts that the OECD's PISA has become influential in policy terms globally, but analyses the ways that the main PISA and PISA for Schools tests are positioned differently in Australia and the USA because of contrasting educational federalisms in the two nations. Our argument is that while PISA is undoubtedly influential, its effects…

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, states have considerably more flexibility and authority in K-12 education than they had under the previous federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The Trump administration and the Republican Congress, meanwhile, moved in 2017 to further loosen federal accountability rules and give…

All states value their distinct approaches to policy and to life and the U.S. Constitution embeds the idea of state rights and responsibilities as a core principle in the federal system. California arguably takes this further than most. This paper provides a new way to think about how national policies might complicate or augment the next state…

Issue framing is a powerful way for advocates to appeal to the value systems of constituency groups to evoke their support. Using a conceptual framework that focused on radial frames, metaphors, and lexical markers, we examined the linguistic choices that Common Core opponents used on Twitter to activate five central metaphors that reinforced the…

This article reviews the influence of liberal ideas on the capacity for Religious Education (RE) to consider religions critically in a climate of increasing government intervention in education. It finds that criticality in some areas of RE is absent or limited but that in key areas criticality is evident if not always deeply embedded. It…

Set against a period of rapid change, education has grown in political importance and policy development has moved from the local authority to central government with a key role being played by the Secretary of State. Based on a series of semi-structured interviews, with 10 politicians who have served as Secretary of State for Education, this…