This collection of reflections serves as a companion to the California Collaborative's report, "Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing: Lessons About Effective School Board Governance From Napa Valley and San José Unified School Districts." The report describes the experiences, practices, and learnings from two school boards in California…

This policy-interested South Australian public education case study problematises how the Chief Executive (CE) and members of the Education Department's Senior Executive Group (SEG) understood system and school improvement from 2018 to 2022. We applied Carol Bacchi's, "What's the Problem Represented to be?"(WPR) policy analysis framework…

In recent literature, K-12 public schooling is cited as a driver of a post-truth phenomenon referred to as truth decay. Truth decay is attributed as contributing to the rise of post-factual politics and the deterioration of civil discourse in the United States. The rise of post-factual politics and the deterioration of civil discourse is perceived…

School leadership plays a crucial role to quality education. Social changes have led to an increase in school principals' competencies, responsibilities, and demands. There are significant gaps in the literature on school leadership and limitations in the study of principals' responsibilities. This study aimed to analyse whether principals…

Reflection is fundamental to teachers' agency, professional learning, and sustainable school improvement. This study investigates schoolteachers' conceptions of reflection and the factors they report as affecting their engagement in it. The study deploys Habermas' (1984) theory of communicative action, specifically the "lifeworld…

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that…

When COVID-19 forced a set of extraordinary challenges upon the U.S. education system in March 2020, risk and uncertainty were constant. Many stakeholders sought to weigh in on the endless choices confronting school leaders, including the teachers who would implement those decisions. In speaking with teachers union and association leaders across…

In the wake of the focus on improving the quality of education in the international community, the development of the cause of education in mainland China has entered the stage of high-quality development. Currently, the construction of internal governance structures for primary and secondary schools in mainland China exhibits three areas of…

Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) serves the beautifully diverse city of Oakland in California's East Bay. The city, or "the Town" as Oakland natives might say, is steeped in community members' dedication to fighting for equity, particularly in education. The decades-long history of organizing and activism, especially that of Black…

Ideas about educational improvement are contextual and contested. This study proposes a critical and pragmatic framework to analyse systemic improvement, taking into account the paradoxes and limitations of quantitative sources. The study compared 83 subnational educational systems of three federal countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil,…

There is growing acceptance that governing boards in English schools and academies should be diverse. Yet progress towards this strategic aim remains slow despite initiatives to address this. We ask whether boards represent their communities and whether they model diverse and ethical leadership as seen in the culture and values of a school or…

Throughout the last 30 years, many European countries have 'modernized' their governance of education. For the Central European school systems of Austria and the German Bundesländer it has been claimed that this 'modernization' was characterised by a sequence of reform 'waves' which culminated in introducing 'evidence-based governance' models…

This paper explores how the charter school sector evaluates the success of specialized education programs in order that the Nature School can learn from these best practices and develop its own framework. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with five evaluation experts and eight diverse charter school authorizers overseeing a significant…

The many pressures facing school districts -- academic and social-emotional recovery from the pandemic, educator shortages, fragmented funding streams and programs, and more -- can easily overwhelm educators and distract from the core work of instruction and student learning. Locally elected school boards, the governing bodies responsible for…

This mixed methods exploratory case study illuminates work of educational governance in a rural school district that has experienced dramatic improvement over a five-year period between 2017 and 2021. As such, we offer practical insights about how these leaders support continuous improvement, and theoretical insights about rurality, leadership,…