Background/purpose: Policy alienation is considered to be significant for successful policy implementation and is linked to public professionals' attitudes towards change. The current study was conducted to investigate the influence of educational employees', namely teachers' and school administrators', policy alienation on their change cynicism…

Nowadays, in this rapidly changing environment, organizational learning constitutes a critical component toward school effectiveness. In a transitional period, the Greek nation is going through, as a consequence of a multifaceted and multi-layered crisis, the future of Greece's well-being depends on improving educational performance to boost…

Schools and districts have long grappled with race- and disability-based exclusionary discipline inequities. Research on the topic has uncovered a variety of systems that maintain such disparities, including school policies and practices that exacerbate the problem. Researchers and practitioners have increasingly considered school context and…

Background/Context: Scholars and practitioners continue to work to identify ways to change structural conditions, school-level policy, and stakeholder mindsets to support minoritized youth in advanced coursework. Open access policies, in which students do not need a previous teacher's approval or a prerequisite grade to enroll in an advanced…

Schools routinely face federal and state mandated changes, like the Common Core State Standards or standardized testing requirements. Sometimes districts and schools want to take on new policies and practices of their own, like anti-bullying programs or using technology to deliver instruction. Regardless of the origin of the change, implementation…

After decades of accountability and market-based reforms in education, school systems are now organizing more around improving teaching and learning. Yet these efforts frequently yield unintended, superficial, or even counterproductive changes at the school level. In this article, Maxwell Yurkofsky develops the concept of technical ceremonies as a…

This study builds on research which contends that just as effective principals must lead across a broad purview of responsibilities in order to build successful schools, so too must middle leaders. Decentralisation of school management has resulted in an expansion of school principals' responsibilities, contributing to a further distribution of…

Education market advocates frequently argue that socioeconomically disadvantaged students could be the main beneficiaries of privatization and market policies. However, the international evidence has shown how privatization and pro-market policies have a negative impact in terms of equity, which particularly affect socioeconomically disadvantaged…

Australia's schooling systems, like many around the globe, are currently pursuing a 'school improvement' policy agenda. Schools, and school leaders, are under pressure to improve student achievement as measured through high-stakes testing, the results of which are often publicised with little contextual information attached. Research has…

The use of 'soft barriers' to deter students with special educational needs (SEN) from accessing some schools has been reported in the Irish media. This article investigates the influence of ethos and culture on access to and inclusive practice in mainstream schools in Ireland. Ethos and culture are nebulous concepts yet are integral to how…

While many studies explain the contributions of economics and environmental protection to social sustainability, and discuss how to achieve sustainable development (SD) through education, less is known about change processes in order to ensure the sustainable development at school. The authors emphasize that as active members of the school…

This article explores the critical role of school leaders in language policy change, and specifically in shifting their language education policies and practices from monolingual to multilingual. We examine the process of language policy change in three schools that were involved in a project aimed at increasing the knowledge base of school…

This volume contains selected papers submitted to the 20th Jubilee Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), conducted virtually in June 2022. The 20th BCES Conference theme is "Towards the Next Epoch of Education." The theme is focused on problems, discussions, changes, solutions, and…

"Soft" policy has newly emerged as a policy implementation concept in relation to governance. Non-binding in character, "soft" policy is designed for multi-level systems of governance in which there is relative autonomy at different levels of collective decision-making. "Soft" policy has gained attention since the…

Based on data from a longitudinal multiple case study, this article describes how district-level expectations, policies, and practices affected principals' responses to an external reform in two school districts, one urban and one suburban. The specific reform highlighted is a comprehensive family and community engagement approach developed…