While several studies have investigated the role of parental school choice in exacerbating school segregation, less attention has been paid to the role of institutional contexts and specific educational policies and regulations. However, since the institutional context sets the framework for both school autonomy regarding the admission process and…

The global establishing of school choice has often and convincingly been criticised in terms of social inequality because parents have very different access to resources to enforce their expectations and demands as 'costumers'. What is less discussed in the literature is the perspective of the 'providers': Do schools have to give up their position…

In this paper I argue for a necessary -- and possible -- paradigmatic shift in early childhood scholarship that embraces multiplicity, diversity, ambiguity, uncertainty and shared situated knowledge creation in response to a profoundly changed global context. The contours of the new paradigm are already emerging as three interconnected…

In this article, we explore how locally situated educational practices and policies aimed at inclusion and integration may contribute to racialised exclusion for students. Our analysis brings together two ethnographic studies of how minoritised Muslim youth navigate secondary schooling in Denmark and the US. Our cases illustrate how assumptions…

International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of…

Singapore is described as a hybrid neoliberal-developmental state. While politicians have, since the city-state's independence, exercised 'strong' ideological leadership over Singapore's economy and society, including education -- there are simultaneously aspects of 'neoliberal' logics in Singapore's education system: extensive school choice and…

Including all children in large-scale educational studies is a pressing concern. Omitting certain types of children from studies can lead to skewed findings that promote inaccuracies about learning levels or educational quality. Increasingly, assessments are a method for investigating the quality of education systems, but national assessments are…

International schools are commonly depicted in the academic literature and popular press as offering elite educational credentials to an elite, oftentimes international, student body. In this paper, I draw on a case study of a Canadian international school to argue that a new form of international school is emerging in China--one that offers a…