High-quality early elementary years offer a critical opportunity for child development and academic learning for all children, regardless of their race, family-income level, or culture and home language. All students deserve access to high-quality teachers and leaders trained in how to effectively support their learning. They deserve to attend…

The Government is committed to introducing a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) to assess the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Designing the right solution is challenging. There is no off-the-shelf solution from other countries that we can lift. But we can learn lessons from other sectors. This pamphlet explores rating…

Widening participation is on the political agenda but, to date, policy, practice and research has focused on undergraduate education. This article identifies an emerging widening participation focus on doctoral education. Using England as a case study, the article examines this development within the context of the long-standing concern with…

This article draws on data from cases of high-performing and improving schools in Hong Kong. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with principals, middle leaders, and senior teachers to identify key policies and steps taken for their enactment, and to solicit interpretations of the policies. Principals were found to actively select,…

As more and more cities and states diversify the educational options available to parents and students, creating magnet, open-enrollment, small school, career and technical, charter, and private school opportunities, educational choice markets need to become a part of the regulation conversation. In this report, Mike McShane examines the…

This article interrogates the extent to which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) through its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) influenced the development of Project Maths, a new second-level mathematics education policy in Ireland. It argues that the Irish government, in its revision of mathematics…

This chapter examines the charter school policy and planning network and how this network is helping to grow urban charter schools and related advocacy organizations across the United States.

This article presents findings from a recent study of the education policy uses and impact of international large-scale assessments, namely the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The paper focuses on two overlapping dimensions of PISA's education policy use in the context of Spain. These include political dimensions, such as…

In 2008, the European Council agreed on a Resolution on better integrating lifelong guidance into lifelong learning strategies. The Resolution promoted lifelong guidance as a policy to support people during the multiple transitions provoked by a more volatile labour market. However, when looking into the guidance policy of Denmark, the Resolution…

This paper is a case-study analysis of methylated spirit drinking in England in the 1920s and 1930s, focussing in particular on moral panic about deviant consumption and the development of policy-making. During the interwar years there emerged a statistically minor, but socially significant, culture of drinking methylated spirit -- an industrial…

Policy makers today rely primarily on technical data as their basis for decision making. Yet, there is a potentially underestimated value in substantive reflections of the members of the public who will be affected by a particular regulation. Viewing professional policy makers and professional commenters as a community of practice, we describe…

Teacher collaboration and engagement in policy offer hope for improving teacher recruitment, retention, and morale-and for reenergizing the profession. Unfortunately, teacher engagement in education policy is woefully lacking. Research has shown that 70 percent of teachers feel out of the loop in district decision making. "Everyone at the…

We argue that the concept of a "policy prolepsis" is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes educational practices within spaces of desired policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses represent a range of emergent policy ontologies produced through the interface of educational actors' senses of policy and their estimations of…

How working conditions, personal characteristics, and school factors influence teacher recruitment and retention is an oft-studied topic in the field of education finance and policy. Through decades of research, it has become increasingly clear that teachers respond to a set of monetary and non-monetary factors when making decisions in the teacher…

The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program…