In discussions of the regulation of teaching, there are a number of issues which arise concerning how teachers understand the professional expectations upon them and the role that such standards play in supporting and maintaining the ethical dimensions of teachers' practice. Arguably, teachers' professional standards evolve to meet the needs of…

This paper was invited as a commentary on the keynote paper for this special issue by Simon Marginson and Lili Yang. The paper begins by noting the importance of a fully balanced approach to comparison in higher education, that gives equal value and weight to Sinic and Anglo-American views by adopting a transpositional approach and also…

High school instructional leaders describe how they reframed professional learning around autonomy with structured support. The new system, guided by trust and teacher inquiry, sparked innovation that proved critical during the pandemic.

Knight, an author and consultant, writes on the importance of protecting teachers' autonomy and discretion in instructional coaching arrangements in the face of schools' tendency to presume a need for greater top-down control. He describes how valuing autonomy can change how coaches and school leaders think about traditional elements of…

In this Discussion Paper, the author presents a review of the papers in this collection, based upon the theme "Responsibility and responsibilisation in education." Each author in their own way has expressed a concern for analysing and charting the effects of the process called "responsibilisation" in the realm of education…

The COVID-19 pandemic, recent awakening of society to its enduring racial pandemic, rising expectations for employer accountability, and an increasingly diverse populace jointly indicate that times are changing for the future of education work. Yet the approach to human resource management (HRM) employed in schools has been criticized for being…

Purpose: This paper explores, from the perspective of an Australian pracademic, how school leaders are leading during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: This essay explores the tensions navigated by school leaders leading during this time of global crisis, by looking to research as well as the author's lived experience.…

This chapter will explore the experience of educational leadership in state schools in England. It begins with a brief outline of the history of state education before assessing how education currently operates as part of the political-economic shift to a competition state. School leaders in England work in a culture described as high…

Improving the quality of education is a permanent concern for national policymakers. In that regard, a growing number of education systems have implemented a monitoring system where pupils have to take standardised tests at regular intervals during their school career (OECD, 2013). This article aims to offer food for thought to the readers of…

An increased emphasis on writing standards has recently led many U.S. states to incorporate text-based writing assessments into their test-based accountability system. This creates political and pedagogical tensions that teachers must navigate in their classroom use of writing rubrics. While prior research has focused on rubric design and/or the…

While people at all levels of education are talking about teacher leadership, few are talking about the bold type of leadership that puts teachers in charge of whole-school success. Many current forms of teacher leadership have teachers carrying out solutions that others have created. Rarely does teacher leadership involve teachers designing and…

For much of the last two decades, beginning with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, the top political leaders have shown concern about children stuck in failing public schools. NCLB required districts to do something -- not enough, but something -- about those schools. Millions of children still languish in low-performing schools,…

This is an era of significant government involvement in schools in England, despite consistent rhetoric from the Department of Education to the contrary. In such a period, signs can be detected of the juncture between a postmodern identity and post-professional status, two models of teacher professionalism supposed in Hargreaves' work on the…

Five years ago, Baltimore City Public Schools seemed on the brink of a breakthrough. The district had been freed from mayoral control after more than a century, and a high-energy superintendent was leading bold moves to de-emphasize central administration, give schools greater autonomy, and engage families in a revitalized portfolio of educational…

Until the late 1990s, Qatar's educational system used the intrinsic-nationalistic and cultural traditions of Arabic schools. The Qatari leadership and stakeholder was outdated; hence, they approached the RAND Corporation to examine and analyze the existing educational system and recommend options for building a new educational system. The RAND…