The central thesis of this article is that conceptualizations of accountability systems need to be more encompassing to accommodate the current diversity of school choice. This article examines an emerging type of school that specializes in advanced STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curriculum for gifted and academically…

The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world's education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the…

Education in Finland is facing new challenges in the form of two related trends: "therapisation" and "projectisation". The concept of therapisation describes the ways in which ideas, discourses and practices from counselling, therapy, psychiatry, educational and clinical psychology become internalised and normalised in education. Projectisation…

The collective action predicaments of the time require citizens to participate in remaking the governance of civil society so that they can become engaged and cooperate together. Can citizens become makers of civil society? This article draws upon Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution" to provide a theory of remaking in which citizens come together to…

The notion of raising the aspirations of socially disadvantaged students is a key policy strategy in for enhancing such students' participation in higher education. However, this strategy runs the risk of being simplistic and ineffective unless it is informed by research on the links between aspirations and such students' changing life experiences…

Traditionally, the goal of foreign language education has been to teach learners linguistic and cultural knowledge so that they could function successfully in the target language and cultural environment. But does demonstrating knowledge always help learners accomplish their interactional goals? To explore this question, this study investigate…

In studies of minority language education, researchers tend to base their arguments on the assumption that knowledge empowers and ignorance disempowers. In this article, however, I show two alternative dynamics of knowledge and relations of dominance by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork at a secondary school in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1997-8.…

This paper reviews New Labor priority educational policies since 1997 that have attempted to break the link between poverty and low educational achievement in England. It does so by examining these policy priorities against a mapping framework developed by the author for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Education and Poverty programme. This…

This paper considers the discursive production of violence in the context of educational markets. Drawing on a larger study of sexually violent incidents that occurred in an elite private boys' school in Sydney, Australia, in 2000, the paper examines disciplinary traditions and communicative practices surrounding these events. Insights from Michel…

This article examines "power" as a concept that operates covertly and panoptically in schools. My goal in discussing stealth forms of power is to discuss methodological opportunities that result when formalizing power other than as a binary of authority-influence. The article offers four methodological axioms for consideration when researching…

This paper explores the potential for conducting collaborative and critical research in higher education which problematises the role and practices of the academy in maintaining exclusion. It begins with a brief discussion of UK government discourse on widening participation, and contrasts this with the research literature which indicates the…

In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s Foucault held a course at the College de France on the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German ordoliberalism, the Austrian school characterized by Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the form of the Chicago school. Among Foucault's great insights in his work…

This paper raises the issue of what it is to be "critical" in education studies and in social theory more generally. It argues that this idea has for a long time been associated with forms of social constructionism and sociological reductionism. These understand the idea that knowledge is social in terms of reducing it to the experiences and…