Using frame analysis, the present study examined the intersections of science of reading research, media coverage, and state literacy policy to explore how Colorado policy and media documents have defined reading achievement. It also analyzed the values, assumptions, and agendas within these definitions. It identified diagnostic frames that…

In the past 40 years, performance funding has become a state policy reaction for the demand of transparency for public higher education institutions. State legislatures have adopted performance funding as a mechanism to hold public higher education accountable for student outcomes. States vary in the metrics they implement, the funding allocation…

This study investigated principals' perceptions of Illinois teacher evaluation reforms, applying education policy implementation theory and micropolitics of personnel evaluation as conceptual frameworks. Interviews were conducted with 20 Illinois public school principals. Findings revealed micropolitics influenced the development and…

Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and…

Mapping India's vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India's Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified…

How do school district administrators make sense of educational equity as they undertake reform? This study examines tracking policymaking in two urban school districts. Using case studies and an interpretive approach, the study highlights school district leaders' shifting ways of making sense of tracking and (in)equity while facing achievement…

The professionalisation of teaching in Australia is a policy shift that transpires within broader policy dynamics which are increasingly influenced by neoliberal logics. In this article we examine teacher responsibility through analysis of a new measure introduced in Victoria. This requires teachers to prove professional development hours in the…

The well-documented global economic disinvestment in schooling necessitates critical examination of policy discourses that influence educational systems and student learning. Situated within the critical policy studies tradition, the present study conducted a critical discourse analysis of the Donaldson Report (2015), a proposed comprehensive…

How is it that neoliberal education policies, often lacking evidentiary basis, come to be endorsed--often by the very people they alienate and marginalize? This work seeks to expose how this kind of exclusive policy is sold to a public through intricate hortatory tools. Using critical policy analysis with an emphasis on historical development and…

Although characterized by repeated ethnic conflicts, Sudan has implemented affirmative action at universities since the 1970s for students coming from war zones and remote areas. The implementation of compensatory measures has been promoted--somehow imposed--by the several peace treaties and by the massive expansion of higher education during the…

In the United States (US), an increase in standardization, quantification, competition, and large-scale comparison--cornerstones of neoliberal accountability--have been accompanied by devices of transparency, through which various forms of school data are made available to the public. Such public reporting, we are told by politicians and education…

Utilizing "assemblage," a notion associated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), we explore what discourses of transparency can, and cannot, accomplish in a network of education reform that includes schools, government agencies, and community organizations. Drawing on data collected between July 2011 and March 2013 in an…

This article analyzes how the Obama administration used executive power to grant waivers from federal education policies and assesses whether they used this power differently than previous administrations and in other sectors (e.g., health or welfare). The executive use of waivers to shape state policy is not a new trend. However, we find that…

This paper discusses employing queer theory (QT) and queer legal theory (QLT) for critical policy analysis as applied to education. In doing so, the authors will highlight how both QT and QLT can empower analyses to look beyond the identity politics of a particular time period or space and toward potential reforms in curriculum, pedagogy, and…

The opposing principles of local control and increased standardization are a prominent tension in the United States' education system. Since at least the early 1990s, this tension has taken shape around the accountability movement, defined by educational reforms that hold schools, teachers, and students accountable for performance on new…