The purpose of this study is to contribute insights into strategic work in an educational reform context. Empirical data were collected from four cases in Norway, where the national educational authority recently initiated a renewal of the national curriculum for primary and secondary education. The theory of strategy as practice was the…

Swedish compulsory schools are committed to work for equality and social cohesion. Increasing school segregation, however, challenges this commitment. Based on survey data from Swedish municipalities, this article maps and analyses local initiatives that counteract school segregation. We identify three main types of initiatives--reinforcement,…

Driving across tracts of new-home development in El Paso, Texas, one can't miss the signs of charter-school momentum. Charter-school enrollment has been growing in Texas for years, but in many localities and even at the state level, charter schools had until recently encountered harsher treatment from policymakers than what advocates have…

In business, entrepreneurship is considered an impetus for change and innovation, potentially leading to the implementation of effective change and practices. In the last two decades, a discourse on entrepreneurship has surfaced within the education system. This study focuses on entrepreneurial processes initiated and led by local education…

Organizational frameworks in Swedish schools have resulted in instrumentality and measurability. To literature studies, this has led to a focus on comprehension and proficiency at the expense of aesthetic aspects of fiction-reading. This study examines how teachers in Swedish upper secondary schools relate the aesthetic experience to literature…

Understanding and implementing educational reform policies is a daily practice in the professional lives of school actors. The discrepancy between how reforms are intended and later realised in the local context constitutes an ongoing discussion spanning multiple areas of research. This article adds to prior research by exploring the role of…

The relationship between "stability" and "change" is a central paradox of administration that pervades all forms of organizing. Evaluation is not unfamiliar with paradoxical objectives and roles, which can result in tensions for evaluators and stakeholders. In this article, paradoxes between stability and change in the…

This paper explores school leaders' and teachers' ideas about drivers of improvement at local level in the decentralised Swedish school system. An institutional perspective is applied to investigate how institutional logics at macro level are played out at micro level in improvement processes. The paper draws on a three-year collaborative research…

Over the past fifty years, school districts have consolidated in an effort to achieve economies of scale. While the determinants and effects of district mergers on operations have been studied (Gordon and Knight 2006; Duncombe and Yinger 2007; Jones et al 2008), the impact on communities has not. In small towns, schools not only educate, but also…

This study addresses a fundamental but neglected aspect of efforts to ensure quality and improvement in a decentralised school system: the relationship between the local education authority (LEA) and local school principals. Empirically, it is based on analysis of relevant documents and interviews with key actors in a Swedish LEA (a municipality),…

The university-city relations are changing along with the engagement of universities in public service beyond teaching and research and the dependence of cities on networks rather than enclosure to promote urban competitiveness. Taking China as an example, this article discusses the challenges and tensions of university-city interaction in the…

It is not possible to predict how we might re-exist/resist while most of our bodies fail to be hospitable to the virus. For now, what seems possible, and potent, is to make strange the solutions we have been putting into practice, while sharing the world and our bodies with this enemy / companion species. This article focuses on some solutions…

Intergovernmental Relations are conventionally defined as important interactions between governmental units of all types and levels. In the process of universalization of rural preschool education, intergovernmental relations act as an increasingly significant role in facilitating the operating mechanism of vertical institutions at national,…

Recent European and global trends in education have been to promote inclusive education and expand education, resulting in the increased provision of special education. In promoting inclusive education, recent special education reforms have also aimed to curtail the rise in identification rates for students in special education, for example, by…

Upon assuming power for the first time in 1935, the Norwegian Labour Party delivered on its promise of a major schooling reform. The reform raised minimum instruction time in less developed rural areas and boosted the resources available to rural schools, reducing class size and increasing teacher salaries. We document that cohorts more…