Drawing upon earlier studies of reforms and institutional changes in higher education, the purpose of this paper is to trace how the understanding of accountability has changed over the past twenty years and how it is understood to have impacted on higher education institutions. We do so by reviewing more than 350 papers and by asking three…

The past informs the future. It achieves this in two ways: first, by providing the context in which decisions are made, and, second, by delivering the various experiences that enable discovery of what does and does not work. As the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system has evolved, the institutional structures and frameworks…

The neoliberal trends which have been become dominant with the 1980s caused the reconstruction of all social areas, especially economy. The World Bank who is the global actor of the neoliberal policies is the object of this reconstruction processes in especially east societies. The economic reasoning is the main subject of this processes has been…

Since the 1990s, charter schools have spread rapidly across the nation. The replication and expansion of charter schools has become a common feature of the portfolio management model which situates the district as strategic manager of a choice-based system including traditional and charter schools. Yet, many school districts have experienced…

The idea of a "hyper-surveillance" state that devolves school management to the private sector and local governments, but, at the same time, evaluates, inspects, and sanctions schools in the name of "educational quality and equality," has been advocated by diverse sectors, right and center-left, conservative and liberal,…

Before the 2000s and the buzz surrounding global rankings, many countries witnessed the emergence and development, starting in the 1970s, of academic media rankings produced primarily by press organisations. This domestic, media-based production, despite the relative lack of attention paid by the social sciences, has been progressively integrated…

For generations, higher education has accommodated its scholars through analog forms of instruction akin to blackboards and textbooks. As society blossomed into a globalized marketplace with information readily available at the stroke of a button, higher education has had to meet the needs of an evolving student population. Through the use of…

Education privatization is a global trend that has nonetheless followed multiple trajectories. This article addresses the question of what explains this variation by demonstrating the role that political coalitions play in the re-interpretation of global privatization ideas. A political-coalitional approach helps us analyze from a long-term…

The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US and other countries, with a specific focus on the macro-level policy contexts of improvement research in education. In the US, earlier analyses examined these policy contexts from a…

Since its inception, Higher Education (HE) has always been playing a critical role for national development through the development of skilled manpower and intellectual civic society. Continuous paradigm shifting in HE in term of institutions' pattern and course delivery mode and method has always been the part of the process of HE transformation.…

Taking the evolution of the quality agenda in the UK as its centrepiece, this article analyses the politics of legitimation accompanying the emergence of quality assurance and the contribution of quality enhancement to the power play therein. This article argues that over the last 25 years the quality agenda has been used as a proxy--a state…

This article critically explores the consequences of the imposition of neoliberal ideology on a transnational scale on the higher education system. Its particular focus is England where the context of the "new managerialism" continues to dominate the "lifeworlds" of educators and the educated, despite strong concerns about its…

This paper examines the internationalization of postsecondary education in Australia and Canada. The author discusses the contextual similarities and differences between the two countries, the shifting rationale "from aid to trade" behind Australia's internationalization attempts and some of the reasons for Australia's success.…

Beginning with a historical review of Irish education policy since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, this paper focuses on the issue of investment in education through the lens of the "Investment in Education" report. Following this historical review, the author explores how the legacy of the past continues to define the…

Education is often seen as a contrast (or even contest) between being a process of liberal education (with the aim of fostering life-long independent, innovative and creative thinking useful throughout life) and delivering vocational education (immediately applicable skills and competencies, ready for the world of work--"employability").…