In this article, we introduce the special issue focused on diverse perspectives to discourse analysis for education policy. This article lays the foundation for the special issue by introducing the notion of a third generation of policy research--a strand of policy research we argue is produced at the intersection of education policy and discourse…

The article, as an opinion piece, considers the experience of Government policy change with reference to the further education sector in England. An Institute for Government report, "All change: Why Britain is so prone to policy reinvention, and what can be done about it" focused on further education as one of its case examples. Those of…

Educational policy analyses have tended toward either the impact of policies on student achievement or the furthering of progressive ideals, regularly theorized through concepts of democracy. In this theoretical essay, I suggest that democracy has become a vehicle for cauterized projects of individualized and contingent state status rather than…

This study explores how to optimize and improve the strategical development of urban schools in China from a policy analysis perspective. Geographically, urban school layout emphasizes the regional distribution of schools, which is affected by the geographical environment; Economically, urban school layout involves the adjustment and allocation of…

Teacher racial diversity has been widely considered important in education. However, it remains unclear to what extent and how teacher racial diversity has been addressed at the federal, state, and district levels. In this study, we employed text mining to collect and analyze over three million documents at the federal, state, and district levels.…

Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit…

This book explores new and distinctive forms of higher vocational education across the globe, and asks how the sector is changing in response to the demands of the 21st century. These new forms of education respond to two key policy concerns: an emphasis on high skills as a means to achieve economic competitiveness, and the promise of open access…

This paper examines the epistemologies and ontologies of education policy studies. Our aim is to posit a reinvigoration of policy studies to hedge against undue ossification and co-option of critical policy studies. We do so by arguing for the need to develop new concepts for policy studies using the "posts" (e.g., post-structuralism and…

States and districts are revising discipline policies to reduce out-of-school suspensions (OSSs), but the consequences of these reforms are largely unknown. We examine a reform in Philadelphia that prohibited OSS for classroom disorder infractions. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, we examine the relationship between the reform and…

In this paper, our purpose is to investigate policy informing texts and discourses referencing transgender equality and gender diversity in the Western Australian education system. Drawing on scholarship from transgender, queer and policy studies, we highlight the interplay of progressive and conservative forces affecting the Western Australian…

Since the 2000s, successive governments in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have embraced the idea of "raising aspiration" among young people as a solution to persisting educational and socio-economic inequalities. Previous analyses have argued that these policies tend to individualise structural disadvantage and promote a…

The implementation within Europe of a credit system for vocational education and training known as ECVET is a European Commission priority. The potential for permeability between the ECVET and European Credit Transfer and accumulation System (ECTS) was foreseen in the Recommendation to establish ECVET in 2009, while the Bruges Communique of 2010…

Drawing on Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Student Census data (2006 and 2011), we examine if there have been changes in the perceptions of school climate between two cohorts of high school students. First, we contextualize our study and review relevant policy changes to student inclusion and equity to set the stages for examining, by way of…

Korean society and schools have become more demographically diverse than ever. To support this increasing cultural diversity in schools, the Korean government has been developing multicultural education policies since 2006. This study aims to examine how multicultural education has been articulated by the government and how the national vision has…

Creating world-class universities (WCUs) has recently become a significant policy and practice in higher education in China under the Double World-Class Project. However, some negative effects have encouraged decoupling from the policy goals. To identify the reasons, we conducted policy document analysis and purposive interviews at three elite…