Central to this article is a case study of one particular governmental instrument in Flanders, the educational magazine "Klasse voor Ouders" (Klasse for Parents). This popular magazine aims to provide information for and communication with parents as one of the target groups in the educational field. Despite the claimed formal and…

This paper focuses on the role of networks in the policy-making process in education and discusses the potential of network analysis as an analytical tool for education policy research. Drawing on publically available data from personal or institutional websites, this paper reports the findings from research carried out between 2005 and 2011.…

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on neoliberal governmentality in higher education by focusing its analysis on the constitution of conflictual subjectivities. Starting from the hypothesis that resistance is constitutive to any power relation and coextensive with it, the paper problematizes the production of conflictual subjectivities in…

Over the last almost two decades, high-stakes testing has become increasingly central to New York's schools. In the 1990s, the State Department of Education began requiring that secondary students pass five standardized exams to graduate. In 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act required students in grades three through eight to take…

This study examines one of the most notable manifestations of Japanese education's incorporation into the global education restructuring movement: the 2007 reintroduction of national academic achievement testing ("zenkoku gakuryoku gakushuu joukyou chousa"). In so doing, I aim to untangle the complex intermingling of national and…

This paper examines the Australian government's Indigenous policy by interrogating the concept of partnership between governments and Indigenous communities through three examples. Increasingly, the Australian federal government is focusing attention on the poor literacy and numeracy outcomes for Indigenous children in remote and very remote…

This article addresses constructions and redefinitions of teacher professionalism by focusing on the discursive negotiations between the government and the teachers' union in Norway. Based on an examination of three white papers on teacher education from the past 15 years and policy documents put forth by the Union of Education Norway during the…

This paper establishes and explains the important role of the Conservative Government of 1959-1964 in supporting the raising of the school leaving age in Britain from the age of 15 to 16. This was a significant and high-profile national issue that generated much educational, social and political debate around conflicting priorities during this…

Campus 2020: Thinking ahead is a policy in British Columbia (BC), Canada, that attempted to hold universities accountable to performance. Within, I demonstrate how this Canadian articulation of educational accountability intended to develop "governmentality constellations" to control the university and regulate its knowledge output. This research…

This article addresses the politics and policy-making of alternative forms of basic education in the context of EFA, with an emphasis on non-formal education (NFE) for school-age children. It explores how policy-makers interpret the relevance of such alternatives, the steps that are taken to implement the reforms and factors that play a role in…

Government reports and documents claim that building a knowledge economy and innovative society are key goals in Canada. In this paper, we draw on critical policy analysis to examine 10 Canadian federal government training and employment policies in relation to the government's espoused priorities of innovation and developing a high skills society…

Debates on the global economic recession have failed to draw adequate attention to the meaning of the crisis for the poor and their education, especially in later developing societies. In this paper, I focus on the education of children of the poor in India--a country that has experienced economic slowdown rather than recession. Available research…

James Scheurich argues that practices of policy--normalized over time through repetition--serve three purposes. They structure social problems for which policy is designed to address; construct certain people, implicitly or explicitly, as problem individuals; and shape policy solutions. Following Foucault, he offers what he calls Policy…

There is growing concern that almost 20 years after the 1988 Education Act, top-down, large-scale reform has stalled. The policy mix of choice, competition, markets, regulation, accountability and leadership seems not to have closed the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged areas and individuals, while most variations in school performance can…

The Australian State of Queensland's "Smart State" policy is the Government's response to global conditions that require a new type of worker and citizen for a new knowledge economy. As a result the Government has produced a plethora of documents and papers in every aspect of its operation to progress Queensland as a "Smart State". The role of…