School autonomy has been and continues to be one of the most important education reform strategies around the world despite ambiguity about its theoretical and empirical effects on students learning. We use international data from PISA to test three country-level factors that might account for inconsistent results in prior literature: (1) the…

Through the use of the Program for International Student Assessment's (PISA) Global Competence results, the Economic Intelligence Unit's (EIU) Democracy Index ratings, and centralization-decentralization spectrum rubrics, this dissertation shows the association between level of democracy and education system, and the association of these variables…

Educational decentralisation has been implemented globally. However, few studies have compared the effects of different decentralisation strategies on students' academic achievement in diverse cultural contexts. Using data from 49 countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015, this study attempts to fill…

This article examines French and English average performances and educational inequality in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) between 2000 and 2018. It asks why English average scores in 2018 are much higher than those of France when they were fairly similar in previous PISA assessments. It questions why the impact of…

Turkey's politically induced 'curricular modernization initiative' intended a philosophical change and a system-level transformation from behaviouristic to constructivist-inspired pedagogies in the early 2000s. Science curriculum has been one of the curricula that has taken precedence. It has changed four times since then. The latest science…

The OECD has become a major driver of domestic education reforms, especially since the establishment of PISA. However, we know very little about the contextualisation of PISA within the publication output of the OECD, and what ideas of education the IO is spreading. In this article, we explore the entire thematic portfolio of the OECD's education…

This article presents a mixed method study on how to develop a participatory education management model as an alternative to the Turkish education administration system. Consisting of qualitative and quantitative methods, the mixed research method has been adopted to acquire the required data. Qualitative phase the education administration systems…

The development of the modern nation-state was an inherently centralising process. Education policy and the institutionalisation of mass public schooling played a key role in this process, facilitating industrialisation and the generation of mass loyalty toward the state. In almost all federal systems, however, education policy remained an…

The unification of South Korea and North Korea is a plausible idea yet it requires a comprehensive preparation in advance. As a method to achieve fiscal efficiency in public services, decentralization theory is consistently applied. However, the current literature and political reality argue that decentralization does not always hold its…

In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) added to their PISA regime the assessment of "global competence". Given this novel, data-driven approach to governing the internationalisation of K-12 education, this study compares this recent intervention to a longer-standing mode of governing for the pedagogical…

This paper explores the global and cross-national landscape of educational pluralism, its grounding in human rights law and contemporary debates, and conceptualizes how it might be measured cross-nationally. It first articulates how educational pluralism is central to the right to education in foundational human rights instruments, with a focus on…

Improving the quality of education is a permanent concern for national policymakers. In that regard, a growing number of education systems have implemented a monitoring system where pupils have to take standardised tests at regular intervals during their school career (OECD, 2013). This article aims to offer food for thought to the readers of…

This paper investigates how and why test-based accountability (TBA), a global model for education reform, began to dominate educational debates in Norway in the early 2000s, and how this policy has been operationalised and institutionalised over time. In examining the adoption and retention of TBA in Norway, we build on the cultural political…

This paper explores third-wave post-neoliberalism as an assemblage, fractured and dis/embodied, a mobile tool of governance articulated in various shapes across geopolitical sites. Post-neoliberalism is assembled alongside other key cultural shifts, such as post-truth, posthuman and the computational turn. In light of this Special Issue, this…

By comparing two federal education systems, namely Germany and the U.S., and their reactions to PISA we show how international, large-scale student assessments (ILSA) have been used by national stakeholders to gain leverage for legitimising or de-legitimising policy reforms in education. From a neo-institutionalist perspective we argue that…