Attempting to support student mental health, many Canadian universities have implemented a fall break with the assumption it would be helpful in alleviating students' stress and anxiety. However, there is no baseline data regarding stress level or mental illness burden of students to understand its effectiveness. Using case study methodology with…

Although considerable research has focused on equity within policy approaches or policy outcomes, how equity is situated during the development phase of policymaking has received less attention. The purpose of this research was to explore the possible connections between equity and institutional policymaking in higher education through a case…

This brief is the third annual examination of how state attendance policies and practices have evolved since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. States can play an essential guiding role in the collection, use and public availability of attendance and chronic absence data. While reporting chronic absence on state report cards is required by the…

Language policy is crucial to any society's cultural and political fabric, as it shapes how individuals and groups communicate, interact, and identify. Language policy has important implications for nation-building and the creation of national identity. Language policy can also significantly impact university students' sense of belonging. Overt…

This article explores the relationship between teachers and policymaking, and in particular a contradiction at its center: Teachers are needed to "people" policy, yet are conventionally named as its objects. As part of a two-year participatory study, fourteen teachers in three schools, including the author, sought to investigate policy…

This paper undertakes a critical analysis of a planned change, the Safe Learning Model (SLM), devised over time by Concern Worldwide, and implemented in 100 primary or elementary schools in a rural district of Sierra Leone. We situate the documentation pertaining to the SLM (micro) within its wider national (meso) and international (macro) context…

In transnational policy, directives on how to improve "quality" through auditing flourish. However, more research is needed about how these quality audits affect school personnel in local contexts. This paper has scrutinised the discursive effects of how "quality" is construed in school personnel's comments during a quality…

Education reform in the United States has unwisely focused attention on standards and accountability to the state as determined by standardized testing (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Mehta, 2013). Stemming from the emphasis on standards-based accountability are the ideas of rapid school "turnaround" and the state's role in this process…

This paper investigates how test-based, standardized accountability is impacting on urban school leaders' everyday work in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. This critical policy analysis draws on theories of new public management and governmentality to document the experiences of school leaders as they enact and navigate test-based…

The 1988 Dawkins reforms were designed, at least in part, to encourage public universities to organize themselves as if they were corporate enterprises, in order to create a more efficient and competitive sector that was less reliant on government funding. This paper assesses whether successive policy changes since the 1988 Dawkins reforms have…

Our systematic, unapologetic, and Black education-focused literature review sought to examine how educational researchers, Black teachers, and Black students describe and co-imagine educational policies that advance Black liberatory pedagogies and practices. Our work addresses a need in educational policy studies to shift paradigms and invites…

In the past three years, more than 20 states have enacted new education choice policies or expanded existing ones. Several more states are considering adopting policies that would allow parents to choose the learning environments that align with their values and work best for their children. However, some critics have raised concerns that school…

National internationalization strategies are produced by governments to frame and drive their internationalization agendas. They are relatively new, but growing in number. This paper contributes to an emerging strand of international education research: that of discursive policy analysis. We analyse the Australian Strategy for International…

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration paused federal student loan payments and interest accruals as a temporary relief measure for borrowers. The pause covered roughly 90 percent of all outstanding student loans, affecting about 38 million individuals, who collectively held a balance of $1.5 trillion. For each of the 17 million…

Drawing on Sutton and Levinson's Socio-cultural Approach to policy, this study explores the experiences and collective language beliefs of 25 teachers implementing the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) policy in two urban Philippine school districts. Mixed methods were used to understand policy enactment and teacher perspectives.…