This article problematises the recent "merit turn" in the Italian education system. It addresses the analysis of how the global idea of "merit as lever for modernisation" and its related technologies have flowed into a regional education space through a set of four policy trajectories. It explores how these have partially…

Many European countries have launched policy strategies for entrepreneurship education in the past decade. The result is a significant increase of entrepreneurship education in schools and higher education institutions in Europe. Entrepreneurship education is supposed to promote entrepreneurial abilities and improve academic performance. This…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the…

Low school achievement and frequent dropout of Hungarian Roma students from primary education is mostly an effect of inadequate curriculum content and teaching methodology. Between 2004 and 2011, the UNESCO affiliated Research Centre for Multimedia in Education at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE University) in Budapest, Hungary coordinated a series…

During the last decade, in many European countries large investments were made to foster the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in education with the expectation that ICT would make teaching and learning more effective. This would, for example, become evident in scores obtained by students in the Programme for International…

In Sweden, and in most other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, post-16 education is a general requirement to succeed in adult life. By the late 2000s, after about two decades of policies for student choice and publicly funded free schools, students' results in the Programme for International Student…

This article seeks to nuance arguments about the impact of broad policy technologies of auditing processes upon teachers' practices by providing empirical evidence of the effects of such processes, in context. Specifically, the article draws upon a cross section of teachers' accounts of schooling practices in a specialist, academically oriented…

The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores…

This article analyses educational inequalities related to socioeconomic status (SES) in 12 Eastern European countries that participated in the International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. Economies and educational systems of these countries have undergone critical transformations since the fall of communism. The authors' analyses, using data…

The results of international school achievement studies had major educational implications in many European countries, especially for the control concepts of education. This becomes exemplarily apparent in Germany, in which a large-scale educational reform was set in motion. Thereby, the education system was set from an input- to output-oriented…

The first goal of this article is to assess, for each country belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the influence of pupils' sociocultural background on educational aspirations. The second goal is to explore whether, after controlling for educational achievement, the residual influence of sociocultural…

This article is based on research in an ongoing ethnographic investigation of schooling in a multiethnic, multiracial school on the outskirts of a major Swedish conurbation in an area of multidimensional poverty. First, it analyses the use of an individuating, visible pedagogy, which contains a large number of routines that are designed and…

Current research into the experiences of refugee students in mainstream secondary schools in Australia indicates that for these students, schools are places of social and academic isolation and failure. This article introduces one such student, Lian, who came to Australia as a refugee from Burma, and whom the author tutored and mentored…

Failure in higher education (HE) is the outcome of multiple time-dependent determinants. Interruptions in students' individual school trajectories are one of them, and that is why research on this topic has been attracting much attention these days. From an individual point of view, it is expected that interruptions in school trajectory, whatever…

What does a country do when its schools and educational system in general do not produce the results the country believes they are capable of? This article describes the political debates that comparative international studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment have given rise to in Germany and Sweden. As a result of the…