Purpose: This paper seeks to illustrate how interventionist education reforms shape dis/trust-building processes and their impact on teacher professionalism in vocational education and training (VET) across national contexts. Using trust as the object of analysis, we discuss the affective mechanisms of becoming a professional in a standards-based…

The New Education Policy (NEP), 2020, adopted by Government of India, envisages significant and far-reaching reforms in higher education sector in India. In this article, I foreground certain peculiar features of the process of massification of higher education in India, including privatisation and fragmentation. I locate the political economy of…

Background: All 50 states have school-entry immunization requirements, and many also allow exemptions based on medical and non-medical reasons. School nurses are responsible for managing student immunization compliance based on state policies, but lack standardized resources and guidance. Methods: Pennsylvania school nurses (N = 21) participated…

Purpose: In the last 5 years, many states have introduced science of reading (SOR) reforms that require increased attention to foundational skills instruction in grades K-3. The fast spread of these policies raises questions about the mechanisms that facilitated their rapid adoption. The purpose of this article is to examine how SOR discourses…

This chapter focuses on Education and Training 2020 (ET 2020), a significant European policy framework that provides an integrated approach to education and training. The chapter identifies the main governance mechanisms and policy instruments used by the European Union (EU) institutions within ET 2020 that lead to increased domestic policy…

The dialogue on what constitutes quality teacher preparation and how it should be assessed and evaluated is muddled. It begins neatly with a universal agreement and aspiration for quality teaching and enhanced PK-12 student achievement, then quickly scatters when there are attempts to define and weigh key components of academic excellence.…

This article conceptualises the relationship between exam board insider research and the policy-making context in which they operate. Exam board researchers are constrained by commercial and political interests in disclosing their knowledge. and face pressures in disseminating research, but also find themselves working in contexts where calls to…

This brief is part of a four-part series examining the past, present, and future of modern school accountability systems. With the dual forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national call to action on racial inequity, the question of how we should measure and hold schools accountable for the impact they have on students is more urgent than ever.…

The National Assessment Governing Board (the Board) contracted with Pearson to design and implement a review of the achievement level descriptions (ALDs) for National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Grade 8 assessments in Science, U.S. History, and Civics. This document describes the procedural and technical aspects and outcomes of the…

The study evaluated a recently postponed national test policy on the use of external agencies' English tests measuring four skills for Japanese university admission purposes. Using Kunnan's principles of fairness and justice, we generated and evaluated three claims regarding the test policy: vocabulary coverage of the tests, the justifiability of…

The National Assessment Governing Board has a legislatively mandated responsibility to develop National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) achievement levels. The Board Policy Statement on Developing Student Achievement Levels for the National Assessment of Educational Progress provides policy definitions of "NAEP Basic,"…

In this article, we examine how the ideal university graduate is constructed in the European Commission's documents on entrepreneurship education (EE). Our analysis illustrates how persuasive policy language determines the standards for educating entrepreneurial graduates to optimally meet the needs of the liberal market economy. We argue that the…

Most states have developed or revised school accountability systems in response to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). While these systems include multiple indicators, to many stakeholders the outcome of central interest is the overall rating or classification produced for each school. These ratings are often used to identify schools that merit…

On February 18, 2015, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) conducted a Performance Level Description Development meeting in Albany, New York. The meeting was convened to articulate the knowledge and skills expected of students at each level of performance, consistent with the policy vision set forth by the NYSED. The Performance Level…

The ways in which examination standards are conceptualised and operationalised differently across nations has not been given sufficient attention. The international literature on standard-setting has been dominated by the psychometrics tradition. Broader conceptualisations of examination standards have been discussed in the literature in England,…