Controversy surrounding the teaching of secular education (SE) has fomented recurrent conflicts between liberal states and religious enclave communities (ECs). The current study explored Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) community-based activism aiming to promote SE in New York Hasidic schools for boys. It sheds light on how Haredi activists'…

In this paper, we reveal and describe the context in which education policy networks in Israel have expanded recently, given the evolving interdependent relationships among the actors involved. We draw upon resource dependence theory, which assumes that actors' power relations within a network depends on their own and others' perceptions of the…

This article identifies new arrangements between the state and non-state actors in the public sector, one that extends current understandings of education privatisation, the transformation of public services 'by substitution' and, specifically theories of the 'shadow state'. Drawing on data from the Political Economy of Teacher Education (PETE)…

This article explores how teachers were discursively positioned in England following the formation of the Coalition government in 2010, using a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 speeches produced by government ministers. Findings show that young teachers were privileged in post-2010 government discourse, constructed as valued and…

While political theorists have elaborated on the phenomenon of neoliberal multiculturalism, many progressive educational scholars have yet to adequately theorize this nexus. Neoliberalism either remains unproblematized or, in some instances, it is imagined as a tendency that is antithetical to and incompatible with multiculturalism. This essay…

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian "practices" of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these "practices" are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to…

This article proposes a framework for thinking about the ghostly, thus arguing that policy can be understood as a landscape of intersecting and colliding temporalities from which arouse curious workings of barely-there forces, spooky energies and vibrating saturations of affective ambivalences. I present an empirical study of a policy agenda of…

This article focuses on the growing development towards new forms of '"distributed" governance within current large-scale educational reforms. The emphasis is on so-called "governance through standards" as a transformative reform complex which manifests itself in a simultaneous process of regulative destabilisation and (global)…

This article examines the challenges and possibilities for UK policy learning in relation to upper secondary education (USE) across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (NI) within current national and global policy contexts. Drawing on a range of international literature, the article explores the concepts of "restrictive" and…

This paper explores the repositioning of state curriculum agencies in response to the establishment of the Australian Curriculum and the key national policy organisation responsible for its development: the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). I begin with an analysis of the federal Labor government's role in the…

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Ronald Reagan's 1983 State of the Union Address. Focusing on questions of scale, the article considers how and with what effects Reagan reconstructs education as a local, state, national and global endeavour. It is argued that by situating education in a competitive global economy, Reagan…

This study is a critical discourse analysis of the New Jersey Opt-Out Movement. In 2015, and in response to the increasing standardization of US public school instruction, and over-use of high-stakes testing, NJ parents began to refuse to allow their children to take a key end-of-the year exam, the PARCC. We employ the concepts of master and…

This article presents a Foucauldian analysis of the political rationalities of national testing and accountability practices in Australia, and their inconsistencies for students for whom English is a second or additional language. It focuses on a problem associated with the statistical data category "Language Background Other Than…

This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising education policy and also begins to develop a new method of policy analysis. In both instances, it draws on the theoretical and conceptual tools of Foucault, and in particular his concept "dispositif." It posits an historical and ontological formation -- a policy dispositif -- with…

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…