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…

In this article, we explore and discuss how the clustering of values in local educational governance manifests in the case of inclusion. Public values and the role that these play as mediating factors are important in local governance processes; however, they are often overlooked in empirical studies. Inclusion is interesting because it is…

In 2008 and 2012, Pioneer Institute published reports documenting declines in enrollment in Massachusetts' public schools. At the time, enrollment had fallen by about 35,000 students over a decade, or roughly 0.5 percent per year, with especially large drops in western Massachusetts and parts of Cape Cod. This paper examines enrollment trends…

This study aims to explore the practice for leading the expansion of the access to and application of digital technologies in K-12 education at the municipality level. Participant observations were used to collect the data in a network with three Swedish municipalities. The study drew on the theory of practice architecture as an analytical tool to…

The aim of this article is to explore how Swedish principals experienced the decentralisation and re-centralisation reforms and how they affected principals' autonomy and decision-making capacity. Data were obtained from three surveys of Swedish principals, carried out in 2005, 2012 and 2019. The results show that principals experienced a high…

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…

A growing number of charter schools are serving rural communities. More than 320,000 students are enrolled in rural charter schools across the United States. Due to a smaller population and geographic isolation, charter schools in rural areas face many challenges. The autonomy and flexibility of the charter school model can help mitigate some of…

Multi-Layered Predictors of ESE Policy Adoption: A growing number of K-12 public school districts in the United States have begun to embrace the whole-school approach to environmental and sustainability education through the implementation of simultaneous efforts to green their facilities and provide related educational programming. This article…

The objective of this work was to verify if there is an association between a merit pay policy practiced by the Rio de Janeiro municipal local administration in the patterns of teachers' mobility and attrition. The research followed the movement of teachers who took posts in the Rio de Janeiro municipal system between 2009 and 2011 during the…

In the past ten years, chronic absenteeism has attracted increasing attention. Research correlates chronic absenteeism with lower standardized test scores and grade point averages. Chronic absenteeism also correlates with higher rates of grade retention and dropping out (UEPC, 2012). Being present in school is a necessary precondition to receiving…

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…

In recent decades, there has been a growing body of research that highlights local education authorities (LEA) as potential contributors to support school capacity building and result development. Despite this, there are few empirical studies that have explored what effects different strategies and policy actions from the LEAs actual have over…

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…

In 1997, Norway became the first country to make statutory provision for schools of music and arts requiring every municipality to run such a school. Based on an explicit vision of "schools of music and arts for everyone," the aim is to provide music education for all children, regardless of social and economic background. Despite their…

This longitudinal quantitative study investigated teachers' development of self-efficacy and teaching practices relating to education for sustainable development (ESD) in four compulsory schools in a Swedish municipality. The teachers participated in a professional development program over three school years designed to support them in…