Coalition education policy threatens to transform the school system in England. A combination of public spending cuts, and the drive to making all schools Academies, represents a key moment in the restructuring of the education service along neo-liberal lines. This article argues that there is nothing distinctively "new" about Coalition…

For many years, England has been the epitome of high-stakes accountability, often playing leapfrog with the USA. It represents an extreme of centralized surveillance, with schools organized as a quasi-market and supervised through a punitive combination of external inspection, the use of test data to name and shame schools, and ultimately closure…

This article presents the author's reply to the comments of Bragg, Allington, Simmons and Jones to his article "Transaction and transformation at Trinity" (Pike, 2010) wherein he reported a case study of Trinity Academy, which serves a former mining community and social priority area near Doncaster in South Yorkshire. In 2008, just…

This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency--involving biography as a form of governance--can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the…

This article seeks to understand the effects of educational change on the people in the change environment through a focus on the micropolitics of change. The views of individuals involved in a specific restructuring process are examined within the context of the current literature on the micropolitics of educational change.

Since its election in 1997 the Labour government's policy has sought to promote a "new professionalism" amongst teachers. First mooted at the time when new performance management arrangements were introduced, the discourse of new professionalism has now become closely associated with the "workforce remodeling" agenda in which…

Notwithstanding its many problems, Canada's education system enjoys an enviable level of equality of opportunity and still manages to perform as well as systems in England and the United States. But Canadian education has been weakened by its adoption of progressivism, or child-centered education, an educational system that is "harmful,…

Offers a brief overview of school restructuring, describing the levels at which it can occur, fundamental shifts required, and three lessons learned from school restructuring in New Zealand. (SR)

Aims to stimulate interest in comparative education policy analysis by critiquing a paper by Stephen Lawton. Such comparative analysis is important in understanding neoliberal education reforms, but more work is needed to provide adequate categories for analysis. Lawton's categories, reformulated here as efficiency, managing and provider capture,…

Mild rejoinder to Gordon and Pearce in same issue argues that purpose of original "Why Restructure?" paper was rather modest. Seven overlapping categories do not constitute a theory but beginnings of one based on scientific-observation methods. Original categories may be applied to any social system for which reasonable boundaries and…

A number of authors have observed a pronounced discrepancy between the problem-solving and action-oriented goals associated with the contemporary philosophy of environmental education and an emphasis on the acquisition of environmental knowledge and awareness in school programs. Content analyses have revealed that curriculum materials commonly…

This paper argues that the realities of school restructuring in Canada are experienced and perceived differently among different teachers, by the same teachers at different times, and between teachers on the one hand and students on the other. Realities of restructuring are often divergent and dissonant in nature. No one group has an inherently…

Argues that U.S. students are not being educated to succeed in a world dominated by the globalization of the economics, politics, and cultures of developed and developing countries. Suggests what educators can do to remedy this situation based on observations of Swedish school system. Suggestions include restructuring education, empowering…

In line with other public sector provision, the English school system has been subject to modernization since the advent of the New Labour government in 1997. This article views the reform of education in the light of the movement towards new public management and traces the process of the reform of workforce remodeling that has seen the shedding…

This paper seeks to tell and untell five stories about the notion of "policy hysteria." The first story, about developments in vocationalism in the United Kingdom over the last decade, serves as illustration for the second story, which is a critical analysis of vocationalist discourse. It is alleged that vocationalist discourse is made…