Through the lens of successive Department of Education and Science (DES) Statements of Strategy (1997-2021) the author considers the evolution of Irish education policy making from the perspectives of New Public Management (NPM) and the public value paradigm. In the context of changing international and national environments, the Strategic…

Recent articles have introduced ideas from Physics, specifically, negentropy, to the social sciences. Applications have been primarily in higher education, online learning, and organizations. This article applies negentropy to PK-12 school contexts, discussing the principles for application of systemic school reform and improvement. Negentropy is…

In "Getting Education Right," Rick Hess and Mike McShane argue that America has too long suffered from the absence of a robust, coherent, and principled conservative vision for educational improvement. The book both diagnoses a problem and offers a solution. The problem? The right has too narrowly focused on school choice, campus speech,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a period for reexamination of how the world schools its children. Policy makers are considering how to address myriad challenges during this tenuous post-COVID era in primary and secondary education. This paper discusses potential school calendar change in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Modifying the…

In this article, we explore the transformational power of holistic studio culture in dance education, drawing from our personal experiences growing up in dance studios that engaged in community events and dance competitions. Unlike traditional studios bound by a single technique, our formative environments embraced a rich tapestry of dance…

This article engages speculatively with Rachel Tonkin's award-winning work of children's literary non-fiction "Leaf litter: Exploring the mysteries of a hidden world" as a potential text for study in the primary or secondary literacy/English classroom. It considers the affordances and issues that may accompany teaching this text, and the…

In "Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism," Sarah Winchell Lenhoff and Jeremy Singer reframe chronic absenteeism as a symptom of a complex set of factors affecting the student, family, and community rather than simply an accountability metric for educators, schools, or districts. Lenhoff and Singer identify chronic absenteeism--often defined as…

The STEM acronym (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) has evolved into STEAM, to reflect the increasingly held view that art and creativity are essential components of math/science teaching and learning. Sadly, too few students are choosing to take computer science classes. When presented as a technical science, many students,…

The past decade has seen declining numbers of 0-4 year-olds while the number of 5-14 year-olds has continued to rise. During this period, most countries increased their financial investment in primary and lower secondary education, improving student-teacher ratios. However, the distribution of teachers remains uneven, with urban areas often facing…

Boys' classroom experiences over the past 20 years have shifted to increasingly restrictive and negative messages on a daily basis. Due to increased accountability, curriculum requirements, testing, and intensification of daily classroom experiences, boys are losing interest in their educational experiences in early elementary school. The question…

The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

Appeals to transformative education are so ubiquitous that if an educational advertisement claimed to only offer instruction, consumers might worry they were being shortchanged. However, the meaning of transformative education is often superficially understood, shifting between various conceptions, each bearing distinct ethical complications. The…

What is pedagogy, exactly? "Merriam-Webster" defines it simply as "the art, science, or profession of teaching." In contemporary academic discourse, however, pedagogy is generally left undefined -- with its apparent implicit meanings ranging anywhere from a specific "model for teaching" (e.g., behaviorist or…

When novice music educators abandon their expressed dedication to forward-looking ideas like equity, epistemological distinctions between belief and knowledge, or lack of such distinctions, may influence such action. Political philosopher Russell Hardin argued that it makes sense for people to hold false, conflicting, and even extreme beliefs.…

This paper explores systemic challenges facing P-12 online education and the role of non-instructional interventions in addressing them. While not exclusively centered on the COVID-19 pandemic, it acknowledges how the global crisis highlighted existing systemic issues in online education. By examining foundational support, needs analysis, and…