This study combines Walter Mignolo's decolonial thinking with Carol Bacchi's 'what's the problem represented to be' approach to analyse how sustainable development is problematised in Tanzanian education policies. We find a dominant problematisation of sustainable development that sees it as a problem of economic competition, further nested in a…

Purpose: To better understand how district leaders at urban school districts innovate and design policies, this study investigated how actors in one district, Oakland Unified School District, discussed ways to improve their education system at school board meetings during 2020 and 2021. Approach: The research used a case study approach to develop…

The Commonwealth-funded school English as a Second language (ESL) program used to be seen by the ESL profession as an essential educational access and equity provision responding to Australia's migrant and humanitarian intakes and its growing linguistically diverse population. In the decades before and after the turn of the century, however,…

In this article, I explore the central characteristics of the "psychosocial" as a field of knowledge in Norwegian education policy and the ways in which these characteristics are conditioned by their constituting social structures and historical contexts. This is achieved through a policy document analysis. Even though the psychosocial…

For national education systems, the goal of an effective teacher recruitment strategy is not simply to attract more applicants, but to attract high-quality applicants who are well suited to teaching and are likely to remain in the profession. The goal of this article is to examine teacher recruitment strategies in England and to propose new models…

Under the knowledge-based economy, higher education plays an important role in cultivating talents and enhancing national competitiveness. Compared with other countries, China is a latecomer in the expansion of higher education but has undergone considerable transformation from elite to massification in a short time since 1998. Most important,…

This paper revisits and reassesses the influence of the context of production on the origin, development and use of the term 'policy sociology' in research in the sociology of education in the UK from the 1980s to the contemporary period. Starting with the first use of the term 'policy sociology,' and its definition as 'rooted in social science…

In this study, we examine how the issue of considering criminal history in college admissions is represented and constructed as a problem in Ban the Box (BTB) policies in Maryland and Louisiana. We draw on Bacchi's "What's the Problem Represented to be?" approach as an analytic tool to interrogate key policy artifacts such as legislative…

To increase the prosperity of nation states and the availability of skilled labour for the global economy, many countries have encouraged students with low socio-economic status (SES) and minorities to enrol in colleges and universities. In Israel, a significant effort was made starting in 1995 to create more colleges and to provide more access to…

Teacher workload is a growing problem internationally. In this article, we analyse an attempt by the state education bureaucracy of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, to address this through the 'Quality Time Program'. Drawing on labour process theory and Carol Bacchi's framework of 'What's the problem represented to be?', we analyse how the…

The launch of Ireland's first official language education policy Languages Connect, Ireland's Strategy for Foreign Languages in Education 2017--2026 (DES 2017) envisages wide-reaching changes for foreign language learning and teaching, both at primary and secondary sector. This study asks if the policy is equipped to address Ireland's main…

In the face of ideologically driven inquiry and advocacy, debates about school choice and public-private-partnerships in education have produced more "light than heat." Although scholars have recently emphasized the need for a greater focus on the particulars of policy design, limitations of existing frameworks have inhibited rigorous…

Globally, the issue of research impact has grown as governments articulate policies around research as a contributor to economic and societal development, often through an econometric justification. This has triggered much discussion amongst humanities scholars in public formally-reasoned peer-reviewed texts that are rarely empirically-based. This…

The value of Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) for school and system improvement is widely acknowledged in education research and policy. Still, the question of how learning happens for teachers and education leaders involved in PLNs remains largely unanswered. Moreover, little research exists on the increasing number of international networks…

This report seeks to provide context for the current landscape of social studies curricula to highlight the need for high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) in social studies. It serves as a starting point for discussions on identifying HQIM and a guide for the development of social studies curriculum review tools, evidence guides, and…