This article presents research relating to the experiences of union and community-based campaigns that have sought to challenge the establishment of academy and free schools in England. Such schools are removed from local government control and are seen as a defining element of the neoliberal restructuring of public education. The research draws…

Accreditation has become an important issue in Spain. This paper presents an overview of Spain's accreditation system; a system which is relatively new and has evolved rapidly, fostered by legislative mandates which established accreditation bodies to regulate the quality of higher education institutions. One of the initial challenges faced by…

A gap in research exists that demonstrates how principals use their authority to make decisions and how that intersects with change management models. The purpose of the study is to examine how one elementary school principal has led change and how teachers perceive the effectiveness of the change. The study seeks to explore principal's and…

System models are commonly used in tertiary education as a mechanism for describing the interacting components of educational phenomena, but have hitherto been uncritically accepted. This paper provides a critical review of existing systems models, including the 3P model defined Biggs, and outlines their conceptual challenges. A revised model…

Background: Scholars widely acknowledge that politics help explain why policies are adopted and how they play out in states, districts, and schools. To date, political analyses of education reform tend to isolate a particular policy and examine the politics of its adoption or implementation, but pay less attention to the effects of the politics of…

This article contends that teacher unions' participation in policy making during South Africa's political transition was characterised by assertion of ideological identity (unionism and professionalism) and the cultivation of policy networks and alliances. It is argued that, historically, while teacher unions were divided along political and…

American educational policy was rapidly transformed between 1980 and 2001. Accountability was introduced into a sphere that had long been loosely coupled, both major political parties reevaluated longstanding positions, and significant institutional control over the schooling shifted to the federal government for the first time in the nation's…

In an attempt to give a general but critical review of school-based curriculum development (SBCD) in China's new curriculum reform (NCR), this article discusses at length some issues remaining in SBCD, including misconceptions in Chinese discussions about SBCD, most significantly, the Chinese literal expression of the policy statement on…

The sixth-form college sector is often marginalised in policy and academic discourse, where the much larger school and further education sectors dominate. This paper sets out to describe the sector's key features, assess its position within the wider education system and consider its future in an increasingly competitive education market. The…

All of the states in this study have recently been involved in school accountability system reform. Since 2011, the states have taken advantage of a federal program to give them flexibility around certain requirements of the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 (NCLB), the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary…

The purpose of this study was to explore the merits of three conceptual frameworks that emerged from a synthesis of literature related to globalization, mission, and higher education. The first framework, higher education and mission, included three frames: important, not important, and emergent. The second framework, globalization and higher…

Purpose: Research on educational leadership underscores the importance of principals operating as instructional leaders and intensive job-embedded supports for such work; this research also identifies central office staff as key support providers. However, it teaches little about what central office staff do when they provide such support and how…

There are many documented barriers to implementing school-based sustainability. This article examines a) the barriers faced by principals and staff in two regional primary schools in Far North Queensland, Australia, well known for their exemplary practice, and b) ways the barriers were overcome. Through interviews conducted with principals and key…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report the formative evaluation results from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Healthy School Communities (HSC) pilot project. Design/methodology/approach: This study utilized 11 HSC pilot sites in the USA (eight sites) and Canada (three sites). The evaluation question was…

Secondary school department chairs are content area specialists in their schools and are responsible for providing students with the most appropriate curricula. However, most secondary school department chairs have limited authority to institute change unilaterally (Gmelch, 1993; Hannay & Erb, 1999). To explore how these educational leaders…