While heads were spinning, policy watchers seemed genuinely perplexed by New York City's Mayor de Blasio's education opinions. De Blasio opposed many of Bloomberg's reform efforts despite the achievement gains realized by the nation's largest school district during the last 12 years. Yet on close reading, de Blasio's nine-page education plan…

It is often argued that as "consumers" of higher education, students, parents and leaders need objective, comparative information generated through systematized assessment. In response, we critique this trend toward reductionist, comparative, and ostensibly objective assessments in the United States. We describe how management has…

Since the 1970s, schools have been characterized as loosely coupled systems, meaning that the teachers' work is weakly coordinated at the local level. Nonetheless, few studies have focused on the local variations of coordination modes, their sources and their nature. In this article, the process of local coordination of the teachers' work is…

Debates about the meanings of inclusive education are long-lasting, and the imperative to include disabled students in mainstream schools is currently under threat by the UK government's educational policies. This paper draws on critiques from inclusive education and critical pedagogy literature, as well as on findings from field research in a…

The purpose of this article is to investigate the multiple political histories that have coalesced to produce support for or resistance to the Oakland Unified School District's full-service community schools policy. It analyzes oral history interview data from eight stakeholders who represent the district's major constituencies to explore the…

This article problematises emerging tensions in Chile, in relation to the discourses of early childhood teachers and public policies aimed at improving the quality of early childhood education. The aim of the analysis is to contribute to developing more nuanced understandings of these tensions, through the analytical lenses provided by the…

This article examines the relationship between pre-service teacher education (ITE) for primary schooling and primary teaching in England between 1974 and 2014, and explores the "fitness of purpose" of the current system of preparing teachers for the classrooms of the twenty-first century. Our historical analysis suggests that, despite 40…

The Conservative-led Coalition government in Britain is strongly committed to a programme of austerity. In the short term, this is a programme which makes more difficult the country's exit from a period of recession and slow growth; in the longer term, it threatens cuts and privatisation which call into question the welfare state. Yet,…

America's education system faces a stark dilemma: it needs governmental oversight, rules and regulations, but it also needs to be adaptable enough to address student needs and the many different problems that can arise at any given school--something that large educational bureaucracies are notoriously bad at. Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim offer here…

This policy brief explores Senate Enrolled Act 001 (SEA 1), specifically the provisions for how teachers must be evaluated. After a short summary of SEA 1 and its direct changes to evaluation policies and practices, the brief reviews literature in teacher evaluation and highlights important issues for school corporations to consider when selecting…

In this final evaluation of the America's Promise Dropout Prevention Summits, the evaluation reveals that the Summits not only served as the catalyst for the creation of new programs and collaborative efforts around ending the high school dropout crisis, but strengthened existing work, political and public awareness, and funding at the state,…

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has been hard at work developing criteria and award infrastructure for U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon Schools (ED-GRS), the first comprehensive and coordinated federal policy in the three institutional roles of schools related to environment, health and education. The ground-breaking award…

This paper historicises familiar assertions that English is qualitatively different from other school subjects to highlight historical commitments and sociopolitical effects of English teaching that are often obscured in contemporary pedagogical writing. It juxtaposes three different pedagogical literatures across the nineteenth, twentieth and…

The term "democracy" is ambivalent--in the history of the United States, it has played both god term and devil term, and inspired both sacrifice and trembling. Robert L. Ivie has mapped the discourse by which American policy elites have said "no" to democracy--the rhetoric of "demophobia." This essay complements his…

While the Obama administration's plan to offer states relief from parts of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act--if they agree to embrace unspecified education redesign priorities--has drawn kudos from some quarters, it isn't sitting well in others. Officials in a number of states have praised the idea as an opportunity for badly needed relief from…