This investigation focuses upon the nation of Finland. Described by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs ("This is Finland", n.d.) as a parliamentary democracy, Finland is a free-market economy with a young but progressive history. While the nation's scores on the 2015 triennial PISA continue to indicate above average performance on all three…

This study examines to what extent there is a sort of "political appropiation" by political parties when they seek to set a discourse about the Spanish PISA outcomes. We have consistently found that programs for assessing the competencies of students, especially PISA, have become tools of rationalization and the legitimization of…

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…

In recent years Finnish comprehensive education has often been discussed in both, academic and public forums, in terms of its relatively high learning outcomes and perceived efficiency. Yet what has often been lacking in cross-country comparisons is a critical socio-historical analysis of contingent nation-specific events and features as well as…

This article draws on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to show how his detailed theories of "recontextualisation" and the "pedagogic device" provide useful analytic levers to examine the politics of educational change. We focus on recent policy developments that have significantly impacted Australian school education: the…