The Programme for International Student Assessment has become an important policy tool that has affected educational practices in many countries. Despite some remarkable results in PISA's global ranking tables from China's Eastern provinces, China's distinctive policy response has not been well documented or understood. We systematically examine…

In 2015, Pakistan committed to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4's provision of quality education for all. Target 4.7 of this Goal acknowledges that delivering quality education means ensuring that students develop a set of attributes characterised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in terms of…

Education reform efforts stemming from the Programme in International Student Achievement have strengthened in recent years, particularly in response to the growth of global references societies -- high achieving educational jurisdictions such as Finland, Hong Kong-China, and more recently Estonia and Singapore. Despite political rhetoric,…

In the face of ideologically driven inquiry and advocacy, debates about school choice and public-private-partnerships in education have produced more "light than heat." Although scholars have recently emphasized the need for a greater focus on the particulars of policy design, limitations of existing frameworks have inhibited rigorous…

After eight years of piloting, China's National Assessment of Education Quality (NAEQ) was administered for the first time in 2015. The NAEQ was introduced during the country's transition from exam-oriented to quality-oriented education. The public, in particular parents and students, were required to subscribe to this reorientation. To ensure…

This paper analyzes the impact of global governance by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the Korean education policymaking from 1993 to 2017. This analysis also discusses the implications of educational governance in Korea within the context of a globalized world. We found that the inevitable influence of global…

In this article, a study of combined discursive emphasis on the concepts "culture for learning" and "learning outcomes" in recent education policy messages is presented. These concepts have been individually examined but seldom as parallel or converging policy messages. Inspired by discursive institutionalism, we address the…

This paper examines how the policy process around initial teacher education (ITE) during the pandemic of 2020 was experienced by the leaders of ITE programmes across England. Education policies, it is argued, are solutions to perceived problems, revealing latent values that drive action. Group interviews with leaders of ITE programmes across the…

The article presents two key concepts of sociological systems theory -- externalisation and structural coupling -- and applies them to explain (a) the exponential growth of international large-scale student assessments and (b) the rise of 'policy-relevant' educational research. The author concludes with a comparison between key concepts used in…

While a number of studies have established the growing role impact PISA has had on national education policy, much less is known about the global-local recontextualization of policy transfer, and the role of national policy officials. Through interviews with key policy officials in Norway and New Zealand, the study revealed a growing…

The OECD is an inevitable force in contemporary education. This paper illustrates how the OECD affects recent education policy-making in Iceland with a particular focus on recent documents establishing the new Education Policy 2030 in Iceland and on OECD reports that directly relate to this policy. We illustrate the relationship between these…

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…

The importance of enhancing social and emotional skills in educational settings has gained prominence, with many countries and organizations embracing the Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) framework to equip individuals with the tools needed for shaping a self-identity, emotional regulation, goal achievement, empathy, nurturing relationships,…

The global diffusion of outcome-based accountability in education is contested, with accounts of universal convergence being challenged by perspectives emphasising heterogeneity across different national or local contexts. This study uses data from PISA to explore, firstly, the spatial and temporal diffusion of accountability across OECD…

This study investigates the timing for a global education reform to be adopted locally. Drawing on the Multiple Streams Approach while expanding it with a transnational dimension, the Free-Semester Program in Korea is used to examine the convergence of the streams of problem, policy, and politics. An analysis of policy documents, media accounts,…