Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit…

International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

PISA test data from 2000 to today have shown Germany's education system is one of the most inequitable within the OECD, with high correlations between student background and achievement outcomes. Scholars have identified the highly differentiated school structure, which tracks students as young as 10 years old, as a central cause. This scholarship…

Research provides evidence that gender, immigrant background and socio-economic characteristics present multiple disadvantaging characteristics that change their relative importance and configurations over time. When evaluating inequalities researchers tend to focus on one particular aspect and often use composite measures when evaluating…

Has the gap in average standardized test scores between students from high- and low-income families widened, narrowed, or remained stable over the last 3 decades? The question is important both because the achievement gap is measure of how (un)equally educational opportunities are distributed in the US, and because the disparity in educational…

Comparative international tests of students' achievements have become increasingly popular over the past decade. An outcome of this widespread practice is the tendency of various countries to evaluate their national status according to their pupils' international ranking in such achievement tests, partly due to the common belief that high ranking…

This book contains a compilation of papers presented at the International Conference on Education and New Developments (END 2017), organized by the World Institute for Advanced Research and Science (W.I.A.R.S.). Education, in our contemporary world, is a right since we are born. Every experience has a formative effect on the constitution of the…