The reduction in local control and oversight of schooling represented by the growth of Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) in England raises critical issues for public policy. These include the articulation and exercise of power in the governance of MATs, the future of democratic governance of local services and accountability. Applying Foucault's…

This article considers the changed fortunes of teachers in 2023. It asks, 'how did we arrive at a culture of efficiency, effectiveness and delivery accountability -- a culture which scares away our teachers?'. The thinking and language of Heidegger shows the power of language in asserting dominance and changing cultures. The architect of…

What happens when a state's literacy reform policy allows for ownership and individualized diversification of the policy's instructional mandates at the level of district and school? How do systems and individuals experience the change in reform and respond to both the power and the pressures of having to design and implement their own literacy…

This study explores how White principals in the Seattle metropolitan area implemented an active anti-racist stance through school-based racial equity collaborations. Using participatory action research, the study follows three White principals in the Ally Engagement program, a community-based racial affinity leadership intervention, during the…

This paper argues that through their proactive promotion of particular frameworks of teacher competence, governments and international organisations seek to create an institutionalised discourse that functions to win voluntary cooperation from teachers in redefining their professional roles, in order to meet the economic imperatives of…

International organizations have consistently influenced education reforms in Latin America, but not all countries have adopted the same policy recommendations. This book offers a unique comparative analysis of secondary education reforms in Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, from the 1960s to the 2010s, with a focus on three key areas: manpower…

This memoir essay was originally intended to revisit a time when instructional supervision became the ubiquitous practice in a 'golden age of supervision,' and to valorize colleagues who contributed their scholarly canons to the field. An introductory narrative describes the goals and hopes of a field that emerged through Morris Cogan's popular…

School governance is a topic of general interest worldwide in educational research, and in recent years, it has also drawn widespread attention in China. In order to examine the problems faced in the process of promoting the modernization of school governance at Chinese primary and secondary schools, we conducted interviews with different…

This paper draws on recent research in Europe and England to discuss the politics of accountability. It is suggested that, as policies in education are increasingly focused on delivering technical-managerial accountability, that is accountability understood as evidenced in international, national, institutional and individual comparative measures…

Charter schools because of their entanglements with privatization remain one of the most publicly contested and controversial educational reform initiatives. Charter schools, in theory, are to balance autonomy and accountability in order to provide students with innovative learning environments and increased achievement on traditional academic…

This paper explores power bases and power tensions among education bureaux, inspection offices, and schools in China. The six bases of social power were applied as the analytical framework to scrutinize 13 policy documents and eight interviews with inspectors. The study uncovered three types of power tensions: education bureau's informational…

In this paper, we analyse the trajectory of the French testing policy in education since 1973. Regarding its statistical tradition and its ability to produce its own evaluation tool, France may be regarded as an interesting case to interrogate the capacity of national educational systems to meet international standards of testing. Anchored in a…

The purpose of this contribution is to investigate the Standards and Accountability Movement, as it relates to the roles of administrators and the creation of school culture, against a broader neoliberal, historical context using a combination of historical evidence and critical theory. Employing a critical, comparative-historical analysis, this…

The purpose of this action research study was to examine how teachers embedded in cultures of accountability, performance, and rewards, attempted to maintain integrity and professionalism in their instructional choices, with administrators as supportive partners. In addition, I aimed to explore how teachers and administrators balance power…

In this essay, Jack Schneider and Andrew Saultz offer a new perspective on state and federal power through their analysis of authority and control. Due to limitations inherent to centralized governance, state and federal offices of education exercised little control over schools across much of the twentieth century, even as they acquired…