The potential strengths and weaknesses of a Foucauldian critique of education are discussed and evaluated. The article focuses specifically on the value of Foucault's work for critiquing social and political ideologies prevalent in education, which is understood as a societal institution, and hence, as a modern regime of institutional power. In…

Introduced to the British education system under the Education Act 2002 and later enshrined in the New Labour government White Paper "Higher Standards, Better Schools for All" (DfES, 2005), the Academies policy was set up to enable designated under-performing schools to "opt out" from the financial and managerial remit of Local…

Trends within Western capitalist societies toward the individualizing of social problems, the responsibilizing of individuals for such problems, the treating of social problems as problems of control, ongoing attempts to shift the burden for safety and security from the state to the market, and changing conceptions of citizenship, have produced a…

A majority of American students have taken the journey through schools that progressed from first to twelfth grade. So by the 1913 Committee on the Economy of Time in Education, American education featured a twelve-grade system quickly evolving from the forces of consolidation and corporate efficiency. Such was not the reality in Texas schools.…

Over the last ten years, American Catholic bishops have suffered a catastrophic loss of authority in the wake of sexual abuse scandals. In the midst of these scandals, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] has issued voting guides for presidential elections. In this dissertation, I investigate the American Catholic church's…

The purpose of this study was to understand how women of color who are at the senior level of academe continue to advance while navigating and maneuvering through power and politics encountered in the organizational system. Although we know that there are few women of color at the senior level of administration, this qualitative study provided…

From the Center on Reinventing Public Education's (CRPE's) work examining the efforts to close schools over the past 10 years, in cities of all sizes, two glaring facts stand out: Most city and district leaders are surprised at how difficult it is to close schools. And many of these leaders make mistakes that others before them have learned to…

This November, California voters must decide two policy questions of great concern to public-sector unions. One is a tax hike to stave off further cuts to state spending (there are two versions on the ballot with a chance of passing). The other is a "paycheck protection" measure that would ban the practice of unions' deducting money from…

This article reports on a movement to create a radical new model of higher education in Europe and beyond based on the practices of self-education and militant/co-research during 2011. The article provides an account of a group that lies at the heart of this movement, the Edu-Factory Collective. The approach advocated by the Edu-Factory Collective…

This paper looks at the state of higher education in India--in terms of policies and the trajectory that it has taken in the aftermath of neoliberalisation of the economy. Through studying the discourses that construct the edifice of the educational complex in the country, it unravels the dynamics of how economy, politics and education interact.…

The Inner London education authority was a notable example of a radical and powerful local government body from which the fight for the comprehensive principle in English secondary education emerged. Building on previous work of women's contribution to state education in London, this articles focuses on Anglo-Jewish educator activists who helped…

This article analyses the "soft power" that the Federal Government of Brazil has gained by designing and implementing a very ambitious Plan for the Development of Education. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the country in 2009 and 2010 in order to conduct a discourse analysis of the strategy deployed by the key political agents. The…

As part of a larger research project into the practice and effectiveness of Life Orientation (LO), a compulsory subject in South African schools, this study investigated the views that teachers have regarding the constructs spirituality and religion within the context of LO. LO attempts to teach skills, attitudes and values from a holistic…

The nation's lawmakers have frequently voiced the basic principle that important policy decisions should be evidence based. In this commentary, the authors describe the approach the U.S. Department of Education has taken in its Increasing Educational Productivity project. The authors argue that the department's actual practice in this instance has…

We revisit a long-held assumption in human resource management, organizational behavior, and industrial and organizational psychology that individual performance follows a Gaussian (normal) distribution. We conducted 5 studies involving 198 samples including 633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and amateur and professional athletes.…