This study examines the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), one of the most influential tools of global education reform discourses in the 21st century. The study focuses on the governing role of statistical data in the discourse constructed by the international comparative assessment, referring to the global educational…

There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century social sciences to change urban conditions and populations, and appears today in international school assessments and professional education.…

The question of quality has become one of the most important framing factors in education and has been of growing interest to international organisations and national policymakers for decades. "Politics of Quality in Education" focuses on Brazil, China, and Russia, part of the so-called emerging nations' BRICS block, and draws on a…

On the basis of ethnographic and historical material this article makes a comparative analysis of the relationship between public events, ceremonies and academic rituals, institutional identity, and processes of transition and power at two universities, one in Mexico and the other in South Africa. The public events examined here play a major role…

This reflective essay on the papers in this special issue of EERJ on Northern European curriculum analysis discusses issues of comparison and scale, and the significance of global and local specificities in curriculum research. Drawing on comparative examples from outside Europe, the essay draws attention to some commonalities of the European…

This paper accepts that the OECD's PISA has become influential in policy terms globally, but analyses the ways that the main PISA and PISA for Schools tests are positioned differently in Australia and the USA because of contrasting educational federalisms in the two nations. Our argument is that while PISA is undoubtedly influential, its effects…

This article traces continuity and change in the governance of British education through the comparison of two ministers, Anthony Crosland and Michael Gove. Taking Maurice Kogan's seminal "The Politics of Education" as the point of departure, the article highlights the role of political ideology in large-scale educational change, taking…

In a conversation between Francis Fukuyama, the Stanford-based political scientist, to publicise his new book "The Origins of Political Order," and Martin Wolf, the distinguished financial journalist, Fukuyama compares political systems in countries like China and Singapore with the liberal West. Without taking the analogy too far the…

This article analyzes how the Obama administration used executive power to grant waivers from federal education policies and assesses whether they used this power differently than previous administrations and in other sectors (e.g., health or welfare). The executive use of waivers to shape state policy is not a new trend. However, we find that…

This analysis covers the period from 1925 to 2016 in respect of constructing national and global goals and targets in education and training. Tensions between global and national approaches to target-setting are identified. Equally, the ownership of the global target discourse is discussed along with its contested relevance to both developed and…

During recent decades, the rise of the global economy launched a wide array of social, economic, and political changes in nations throughout the world. Heightened concern about the quality of schools launched what is arguably the most pervasive, intense, and protracted attempts at educational reform in recent history. Examinations of the…

In this paper, we undertake a particular policy critique and analysis of the gender achievement gap discourse in Ontario and Canada, and situate it within the context of what has been termed "the governance turn" in educational policy with its focus on policy as numbers and its multi-scalar manifestations. We show how this "gap…

School districts have two general courses of action to maintain fiscal solvency and raise student achievement in the face of drastic funding cuts. They can reduce spending on teachers, a strategy opposed by many teachers' unions because it threatens teacher job security. They can also cut expenditures in other areas such as instructional…

This article presents a comparative analysis of two country-specific cases. The comparative analysis is situated within the broad domain of the changing knowledge economy landscape for educational policy. The two cases examine the transfer, embedding and enactment of policies during the interactions between supranational, national, institutional…

The PISA project has steadily increased its influence on the educational discourse and educational policies in the now 70 participating countries. The educational debate has become global, and the race to improve PISA-rankings has become high priority in many countries. For governments the PISA-test is a high-stake test. Governments are blamed for…