This paper revisits and reassesses the intellectual and practical contribution of Caroline Benn (née DeCamp, 1926-2000) to politics, policymaking and practice at a crucial turning point in English education, which I call the 'long comprehensive moment' between 1950 and 1990. It articulates a strong sense that her involvement in significant public…

It can be said that there is a large literature on the metamorphosis in the direction of marketization brought about by capitalist globalization in the academic field. In the aforementioned literature, it is stated that the academy operates more and more with the rules of the capitalist market and therefore academic study, education and training…

After the fall of the communist regime, Romania launched the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector in 1995. The reform was largely financed through a World Bank loan and closely followed the neo-liberal ideology promoted by Bank officials. It aimed to privatize and to implement private sector management principles in the public…

Research in mathematics education has long identified the ideology of certainty as central to mathematical instruction and to the way in which mathematics is (mis)used in social and political discourses. As we will see, this ideology is not merely a matter of individual beliefs, but is deeply embedded in the material practices and power structures…

The reduction in local control and oversight of schooling represented by the growth of Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) in England raises critical issues for public policy. These include the articulation and exercise of power in the governance of MATs, the future of democratic governance of local services and accountability. Applying Foucault's…

In this conceptual article, the authors advance the idea of critical whiteness pedagogies by arguing that an improvisational ethos offers an alternative to whiteness and might inspire more nuanced anti-racist pedagogies with white people. This framework is born out of years of collaboration between the authors that resulted in an approach to…

This manuscript is born from contemplating and exploring how it is that we see so little systemic change in STEM education after so many years of working toward it, including the insidious persistence of systems of oppression, and historical and generational exploitation that our current critical, social justice efforts in STEM teacher preparation…

This paper critically analyzes gap discourses in student learning, starting from the achievement gap, education debt, and opportunity gaps, applying the lens of coloniality, racial-capitalism, and modernity (CRCM). Gap discourses are the prevalent rationale behind educational policies and school reforms globally. Specifically in the United States,…

Curriculum, as an expression of legitimate knowledge, should be seen as something political rather than technical, that is, as the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable stakeholder groups. In Shanghai, curricular reform, which traditionally assumes the crucial task of cultivating responsible citizens, has sought to…

Advocacy coalitions have the potential to be a vehicle for community-based education reform in urban school systems, where state legislatures have increasingly adopted top-down policies such as state takeover and accountability systems. Yet, coalitions are influenced by and create their own informal and formal power structures that can include or…

The enduring colonial-like relations among Northern and Southern spaces continue to influence knowledge production and dissemination. Critical scholarship on epistemic diversity in higher education has argued that knowledge circulation is often unilateral considering how global partnerships among universities and higher education models are still…

This paper explores power bases and power tensions among education bureaux, inspection offices, and schools in China. The six bases of social power were applied as the analytical framework to scrutinize 13 policy documents and eight interviews with inspectors. The study uncovered three types of power tensions: education bureau's informational…

This article investigates socialist China's pedagogic treatment of individuality between 1949 and 1958, with a focus on the debates concerning "all-round development" and "teaching in accordance with aptitude," two principles that clashed regarding students' individuality. It reconstructs how educational bureaucrat and theorist…

Borders--territorial, economic, political, and ideological--are processes of social division. They monitor and exclude and are regulated, patrolled, and maintained by an array of power regimes, but borderlands are also sites of movement, agency, and resistance. Likewise, mathematics is used as a border that divides and politicizes. In this…

Understanding the history of educational reform in Ghana--with a focus on the de-colonialization period through the 21st century--highlights the influence of donor funding. This historical study investigates through a postcolonial lens the power dynamic between international donor organizations and Ghana's leaders and citizens. While donor funding…