Teacher shortages are a significant global problem disproportionally affecting "hardest-to-staff" schools and subjects. To better understand (inter)national policy responses to teacher shortages, this paper uses a Bacchian-inspired approach to critically examine proposals suggested as solutions in policy documents from England and…

Contemporary educational reforms emphasise school autonomy, performance-based management, and accountability as necessary policies for attaining improvement goals. Despite their widespread adoption, the configuration and enactment of these policies are discretionary and contingent, deeply influenced by the interaction of local contexts,…

Research on school improvement has accumulated an extensive list of factors that facilitate turnarounds at underperforming schools. Given that contextual or resource constraints may limit the possibilities of putting all of these factors in place, an important question is what is necessary and sufficient to turn a school around. We use a…

Despite the growing number of researches about performance-based accountability (PBA) in education, there is still scarce evidence on the mediating role of subjective variables (e.g., perceived pressure and alignment to PBA mandates) in the enactment of PBA in socially disadvantaged contexts. This is paradoxical because marginalized schools are…

Public policies targeting individuals based on need often impose disproportionate burden on communities that lack the resources to implement these policies effectively. In an elementary school setting, I examine whether community-level interventions focusing on similar needs and providing resources to build capacity in these communities could…

Accountability policies through standardized testing are widespread in diverse educational systems. Based on an ethnographic research study, we sought to understand how a learning assessment policy, used for over three decades in primary and lower secondary education, is lived and interpreted in daily school life in Chile. This article analyzes…

Background: In 2012, the South African government initiated the Integrated School Health Policy (ISHP) to serve as a national guideline on providing school health and support services from key stakeholders such as the Department of Health (DoH), Department of Basic Education (DBE) and Department of Social Development (DSD). However, despite the…

A central purpose of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) is to educate Black students, often in conditions where resources, financial and otherwise, are limited. This study explores how institutional policies and practices foster success among Black students attending HBCUs within these conditions. Using an HBCU-based model for…

This paper examines the influence of intense scrutiny from Ofsted on school leadership and policy enactment. Data was collected in a coastal area of deprivation, providing the setting for a detailed case study of school leadership in a state secondary school and a state primary school, both with recent or ongoing experience of intense scrutiny…

A great deal of knowledge has been accumulated on how educational effectiveness and improvement come to be. However, the issue of how these processes behave once they have been achieved has remained relatively unexplored. In this paper, we report on the findings of a multiple case study that delved into the factors and processes explaining…

This study explores how ICT policies assign positions and digital teacher identities to educators in under-resourced contexts. It examines implications of such positioning on the training of technology -- using language teachers in Rwanda by using positioning theory to analyse positions and identities assigned to teachers in 10 ICT policy and…

Reforms to school climate policies in Chile have led to a marked shift away from punitive approaches for dealing with bullying behaviours, toward more educationally formative processes. Schools in this national context have also been given greater responsibilities for designing anti-bullying practices relevant to their own educational communities.…

Education policies claiming to promote 'excellence' aim to improve outcomes in various quantitative measures of specific standards. However, excellence can also mean individual self-improvement. We analyse Israeli policies at the national, local, and school levels. We structure our argument based on sensemaking theory by applying qualitative…

School improvement and its associated policies aim at providing a quality education, a burdensome weight which rests largely on the shoulders of teachers. To achieve such ends, policy texts have been reformed with neoliberal underpinnings, which allow private organizations to enter a space that previously operated through public institutions. In…

The first paper in this multifocal policy analysis (Young, 1999) is a traditional, quantitative policy study that tested a comprehensive framework that links teacher perceptions of leadership, autonomy, and accountability to principal, school, and teacher characteristics. The study examined the relationship between principals' instructional…