Whole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students' long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee's statewide turnaround reforms, we use difference-in-differences…

In recent years, international development organisations have responded to concerns about the growth of private schooling in the global south by calling on governments to commit to quality public provision and effective regulation of the private sector. This paper draws on the case of India's experience with the Right to Education Act to consider…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…

The major aim of recent school education reform in China is to improve educational equity and quality. This paper aims to explore a collaborative reform in a school district in Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province. The major focus of the reform has been a change of school management from "government" to "governance," which is a shift…

In this paper, we theorize on local school governance through a multi-method case study of a large-sized Swedish municipality by drawing on neo-institutional theory. In light of a changing governing landscape in Sweden in terms of a 're-centralization', new conditions between the state, the local education authorities (LEA) and the schools have…

While students comprise the largest population of educational stakeholders in the United States, they are rarely included in education governance at any level. Although they are among those most affected by education policy choices, they are often left out of education policy decision-making. As of 2019, only 23 states included student members on…

The outsourcing of education services has been widely adopted across international contexts as a 'tested solution' or panacea to meet various educational problems including school management, curriculum design, teaching and student discipline. Contracting third-party providers, it is argued, enhances organisational goals such as efficiency,…

There is growing research interest in school inspection throughout Europe; however, there have been few comparative studies between Swedish and Norwegian school inspectorates. Such a study is necessary since little is known about how inspection policies are shaped through "governing modes" in the two Nordic countries. This paper explores…

The state mandated public hearings concerning school closing proposals in New York City provide a window into a diverse set of policy actors and their deliberations. Opposition to school closures is often cast as entrenched interests, emotional attachment, support for the status quo or at worst negligence. However, content analysis reveals that…

This article critically analyses the current Maltese educational reform process, which aimed to transform educational governance in Malta from a centralized system to a more decentralized one. This longitudinal study adopted a multi-site inquiry of a sample of the colleges involving different stakeholders, including key policy-makers, college…

Recent reforms in England's education system have been justified on the grounds that other countries have pursued similar approaches to education reform. Many such policies that by-pass or otherwise diminish meso-level institutions demonstrate a commitment to the idea of devolving authority to local actors. The current reforms in England and…

Washington is at a crossroads on K-12 education policy. Policymakers can (1) continue down the path of top-down accountability; (2) devolve power to states and districts, thereby returning to the status quo of the mid-1990s; or (3) rethink the fundamentals, do something different, and empower parental choice. This article discusses how the federal…

The attempt to create common standards and assessments in education obliges individuals to revisit some longstanding debates about the capacity of the American intergovernmental system to adapt to new policy demands. Some observers remain skeptical that states have the political will or administrative capacity to develop and adopt higher policy…

Since Congress enacted the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the federal government has emphasized states' shared responsibility for improving student achievement. When Congress reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2001 as the No Child Left Behind Act, it called upon states to provide technical support to…

This paper examines the underlying political and institutional theories that policymakers are embracing as they approve of new mayoral takeovers of public schools, discussing what has fostered this recent governance change that reverses the century-old progressive effort to remove mayors from school governance. Some of the reasons for mayoral…