This paper explores schools' new role in promoting children's mental health, as a key focus for policy makers across the global north. An education policy analysis is conducted for England and Australia, two nations advocating a 'bottom-up' approach to mental health promotion, granting flexibility to schools and municipal authorities. Here it is…

China has undergone unprecedented changes since the Reform and Opening-up policy in 1978. Policy experimentation (PE) has been key in generating and catalysing reforms in the process. This study proposes a conceptual framework to describe the different pathways of PE-enabled reforms. Comparing two empirically informed case studies, this study…

Analysis of school curricula in Vanuatu, the world's most disaster-prone nation, shows that in-depth learning about disasters, and climate change does not occur until the end of secondary education, when only 13% of primary level 1 children are still in school. Furthermore, such education in resilience is confined to optional subjects. We…

This essay serves as a reflexive account of a multifocal approach to policy analysis that employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative study examined the relationship between principals' perceived levels of instructional influence and teachers' perceptions of their working conditions using a nationally generalizable sample.…

Measured in per capita terms, Australia has one of the most generous refugee resettlement programs in the world. This paper investigates the extent to which refugee status is recognized as a category of disadvantage in Australian higher education. Drawing on a scalar view of policy work and Fraser's notion of misframing, the paper assesses the…

Access issues are pivotal to almost all charter school tensions and debates. How well are these schools performing? Are they segregating and stratifying? Are they public and democratic? Are they fairly funded? Can apparent successes be scaled up? Answers to all these core questions hinge on how access to charter schools is shaped. This book…

Despite marked growth in evaluation use and capacity in the U.S. Federal Government over the last 50 years, the levers that have driven institutional change have not previously been identified. This ethnographic study mapped the process and factors that have led to the diffusion of value in evaluation in the U.S. Federal Government. Analyses of…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides guidance and expectations to state education agencies. We examined the intersection of improvement science and ESSA through a qualitative analysis of the state guidance documents. Utilizing six principles of improvement as a conceptual framework, we identified three themes: improvement as an outcome;…

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States on November 8, 2016 set forth a wave of immigration policy changes that would shape the coming years of U.S. international student mobility. Executive Order 13769, known as the Trump travel ban, which was enacted within the same week of President Trump's 2017 inauguration, had…

What impact did the 1988 Education Reform Act (1988 ERA) have on higher education from the perspectives of professors working in the sector at the time? How did it reshape the sector's structures? How did it contribute to the conditions that have unleashed the so called 'undergraduate monster'? These questions are addressed in this paper. I draw…

In this piece the author provides a critical response to the new 'Looking at Our School' quality framework in Ireland and illustrates how policy overlooks critical scholarship. The author questions the claim that the updated policy reflects recent thinking and developments, and critiques the policy's stance on notions of both distributed…

Through a comparative analysis of policy texts from UN organisations and scholarly work since the 1990s this paper examines how mothers are portrayed in simplistic terms, as educated thus beneficial for their daughters' schooling, or deprived of education causing detriment to their daughters' future prospects. Drawing on semi-structured interviews…

Examining the teaching and learning of English as a Second Official Language (ESOL) in Cameroon through language laws and other official documents (like the syllabi) in terms of their actual implementation is an important step in the development of ESOL education. Such investigations may contribute to the strengthening of the minority official…

In this report, we introduce a system for running reimbursed surveys via text messages and mobile cash. The key advantage of this approach is the ability to conduct rapid surveys at an extremely low cost. After reviewing existing literature, we describe an automated system for conducting such surveys and demonstrate its merits in a…

As the primary agency responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws in the educational context, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issues policy guidance to help ensure that school districts and universities understand their legal obligations. These policy guidance documents have direct connections to topics…