Within the broad landscape of early childhood education and care politics and policies, calling quality reform into question is a political act. As numerous scholars have pointed out, policy structures that measure and identify what constitutes quality (and what does not) are not value-free and reflect neoliberal human capital economic agenda…

The rise of China as the world factory in the last few decades has been accompanied by a rapid expansion in vocational education. A growing number of youth from rural backgrounds now have the chance to receive post-compulsory education in vocational training schools. Using human capital theory as an analytical focus, this study examines their…

Psychology and economics are powerful sources of expert knowledge in contemporary governance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming a priority in education policy in many parts of the world. Based on the enumeration of students' 'noncognitive' skills, SEL consists of a 'psycho-economic' combination of psychometrics with economic…

This article examines the intersecting logics of human capital and national security underpinning the corporate school reform movement in the United States. Taking a 2012 policy report by the Council on Foreign Relations as an entry point, it suggests that these logics are incoherent not only on their own narrow instrumental terms, but also more…

This paper explores, from a Foucauldian perspective, the emergence and nature of the current EU education policy priority issue of "early school leaving". The paper suggests that a number of problematisations developing from the failure to secure Lisbon Strategy objectives have served to create a much stronger focus on the issue of young…

In this study, we seek to illuminate teachers' constructions of US teacher evaluation policies through close analysis of the way teachers in one district describe these policies. We conducted a thematic discursive analysis of 60 teachers' speeches, recorded during local school board meetings in a Tennessee school district. Using discursive…

This paper reports on the findings of an in-depth genealogical study of the discourse of quality in Australian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy. Quality reform has become the foremost global policy agenda for ECEC due to assumptions about the economic potentials of quality services. In Australia, the recent National Quality…

At the present, human capital theory (HCT) and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, HCT has provided an economic understanding of human beings and offered strategies to manage the population with the promise of bringing improvements to nations. Neuroscience…

Advanced by powerful venture philanthropies, educational technology companies, and the US Department of Education, a growing movement to apply "big data" through "learning analytics" to create "personalized learning" is currently underway in K-12 education in the United States. While scholars have offered various…

Facing increasing critique that PISA focuses too narrowly on cognitive achievement and human/knowledge capital, the OECD has recently shifted some of its focus to student happiness. The 2017 Students' Well-Being report distinguishes between 'happy schools' and 'unhappy schools', showing that among students who combined high performance and life…

Following the Tomorrow's Schools administrative restructuring, a second wave of educational change installed globalised discourses as governmentality policies in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on Foucault's "toolkit", this genealogical policy chronology traces the transformation of curriculum and assessment into a specific political…

A focus of Government policy has been the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which has been assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This article explores the problems created by "bad jobs" and the evidence for the existence of a…

In 2009, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) set a target to lift Australia's Year 12 or equivalent attainment rate from 83.5 to 90% by 2015. In the context of global financial uncertainty, the target was rationalised as a means for boosting national productivity and developing human capital to help Australia compete in the global…

In global times, university education policy that holds the greatest promise for social responsibility is the focus here; the argument made is that such policy ought to be conceptualised using a normative human development and capabilities approach, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Their ideas offer a values-based way of…

Explores subjective aspects of human-capital investment decisions in education. Explores connections that 11th- and 13th-year British students perceive between their education and the labor market, and between qualifications mechanisms and life chances. Most students believe education plays a market-signaling role and a marginal role in raising…