Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became law, educators have faced challenges trying to protect the common good of a public education while, at the same time, developing and/or reviewing proposals to provide for the school choice option of NCLB. In the debate over market-driven education versus traditional public education, many times, the…

Neo-liberal capitalism is a representation of values that are detrimental to intellectual inquiry. Market deregulation and consumer choice are relentless in their erosion of academic autonomy and traditions of independent scholarship. Education as a 'positional good' may be weakened more in the post-1992 higher education sector, where…

In recent years, the federal government has invested billions of dollars to reform chronically low-performing schools. To fulfill their federal Race to the Top grant agreement, Tennessee implemented three turnaround strategies that adhered to the federal restart and transformation models: (a) placed schools under the auspices of the Achievement…

The goal of this work is to better understand the institutional changes in the educational systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We demonstrate that the educational reforms implemented during the transformation introduced very different institutional arrangements in the four countries, despite the fact that their systems…

Self-evaluation in inspection policy has become a global phenomenon. The idea is that it increases levels of teacher and school autonomy, wherein both schools and teachers have more ownership and responsibility over their work. In turn, such a process has allowed for greater accountability, which is then said to provide high quality education and,…

This article analyses the ways in which a policy actor constructs its agency through the production of knowledge. Taking the example of the concept of "autonomy" as constructed in the discourse of the European University Association (EUA), the article draws on the theory of discursive framing and agenda setting, as well as on Meyer and…

Colleges and universities exist within a political arena where external demands for accountability materialize within a market-driven environment. As a result, government agencies pressure colleges and universities to rely on assessment and transparent reporting to become more market-driven assuming that the competition within the market, led by…

School districts across the country are shifting away from their traditional management paradigm--a central office that directs its schools through uniform mandates and policies--toward a new vision where district leaders support autonomous schools while holding them accountable for student performance. The advent of new governance mechanisms…

Some of the most promising reforms are happening where school leaders are thinking differently about how to get the strongest student outcomes from the limited resources available. But even principals who use their autonomy to aggressively reallocate resources say that persistent district, state, and federal barriers prohibit them from doing more.…

In 2002 Michael Bloomberg took office as Mayor of New York City and, over the next 12 years of his administration, oversaw a series of sweeping reforms in order to "fix" the broken education system which he believed he had inherited. This paper details the key policy reforms in New York City's public school system during this period,…

Public Master's granting universities have long been viewed as a sector "caught in the middle" between their much more prestigious research university counterparts and the more numerous community colleges. The little research that exists on this sector of institutions has suggested that the Master's university classification merely…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the issue of school-based management (SBM) in elementary schools in the Arab education system in Israel, comparing schools experienced in SBM, schools beginning to use SBM and schools that do not use SBM. Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative research used a structured questionnaire to…

The Vietnamese higher education context is characterised by state control, including the state's development of curriculum frameworks and materials. Institutional autonomy has been ratified by the government; however in practice, universities seem to have little control over curriculum. In order for universities to develop more ownership of…

This article analyses moves towards good multilevel governance approaches in Vocational Education and Training (VET) as an effective way to improve VET policy making in transition and developing countries, focusing on the Southern Neighbourhood of the EU (ENPI South). The centralised approaches in public administration and to VET governance still…

The daily work of organising in schools both configures and is configured by the nature of schools as complex organisations. However, the organisational complexity of schools is often omitted in normative and analytical accounts of schools as organisations. In this paper, we seek to redress that omission and to bring organisational complexity to…