Purpose: The article offers a progressive reading of ESD with a teaching example to decolonise SSE despite constraints set by the school system. Design/methodology/approach: The article presents ESD's idea of thought within 'the big picture' of global education. After that, a description of an expert group is given, tasked with developing a…

The Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) has instigated domestic policy debate aimed at improving education systems' quality and efficiency. Its high performers are often described as knowledge-based legitimation tools that have become reference societies. This article analyses if and the extent to which PISA affects the choice of…

Families are active agents in school systems and apply different strategies of educational advantage to help their children succeed at school. These strategies are planned and enacted by families with their children in mind, but they are always a response to the broader education system design. This article explores how through their strategies…

In this article, we analyse the implementation and change of a specific school reform in Germany using the example of external school evaluation in Lower Saxony: the school inspection. We investigate how and why a newly implemented reform is itself subject to reform shortly afterwards. We begin with a historical background of German school reforms…

This paper uses a quasi-natural policy experiment in Germany, the G8 reform, to examine the impact of schooling intensity on student learning. The G8 reform compresses secondary school for academic-track students from nine to eight years, while holding fixed the overall academic content and total instruction time required for graduation, resulting…

The ongoing trend towards educational globalisation has brought about various dynamics of education policy "rescaling," resulting in a growing number of governmental arrangements, which are operating across traditional scales, levels or sectors of policy. This contribution takes up the conceptual frameworks of topological spatialisation…

This study uses the PIAAC data to examine the relationships between education system characteristics (e.g. early tracking and vocational education orientation) and distributions of adult numeracy skills. It also investigates the effects of postponing the tracking age and easing university access for students on a vocational track on the average…

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…

By comparing two federal education systems, namely Germany and the U.S., and their reactions to PISA we show how international, large-scale student assessments (ILSA) have been used by national stakeholders to gain leverage for legitimising or de-legitimising policy reforms in education. From a neo-institutionalist perspective we argue that…

Every innovation should be questioned critically in the sense of humanization of education, in particular with regard to the context and overarching objectives for which an innovation is effective. That innovations are not always improvements will be shown on two international examples from the last six decades. In the 1960s, triggered by the…

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…

We propose a theory of education curricula as horizontally differentiated by their paces. The pace of a curriculum and the preparedness of a student jointly determine the match quality of the curriculum for this student, so different students derive different benefits from learning under the same curriculum. Furthermore, a change in the curricular…

As the field of education has become a highly internationalised policy field in the last decade, international organisations such as the OECD play an ever more decisive role in the dissemination of knowledge, monitoring of outcomes, and research in education policy. Although the OECD lacks any binding governance instruments to put coercion on…

The results of international comparison studies such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) have initiated intense discussions about educational reforms in Germany. Although in-service and pre-service teachers are an essential part of such reforms, little is known about their attitudes towards PISA studies. The present study…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an important cross-national study of 15-year-olds' academic knowledge and skills. Educationalists and public policymakers eagerly await the tri-annual results, with particular interest in whether their country has moved up or slid down the international rankings, as compared to earlier…