School fundraising is known to reproduce inequities in schools, yet it remains common practice in Ontario, Canada; findings from a critical policy analysis of an advocacy group's efforts to change fundraising policy help explain why this is the case. Adopting a discursive understanding of policy, the study used rhetorical analysis to identify how…

We use the metaphor of building a plane while flying to describe the enactment of educational policies by teachers during COVID-19 and the impact of these policies on their ability to meet the needs of their students. Drawing from a series of three one-hour focus groups with seven teachers in Alberta, we apply critical policy analysis to describe…

Fundraising and collecting fees are ubiquitous in Ontario, Canada's public schools. Critics assert that these practices perpetuate and exacerbate inequities between schools and communities. In this article we present findings from a critical policy analysis of an advocacy group's efforts to change Ontario's fees and fundraising policies over the…

As the prevalence and negative effects of bullying become widely known, people around the world seem desperate to solve the bullying "problem". A sizeable body of research about many aspects of bullying and a plethora of anti-bullying programmes and policies now exist. This critical policy analysis asks: how does Ontario, Canada's…

Rhetorical analysis, an approach to critical discourse analysis, is presented as a useful method for critical policy analysis and its effort to understand the role policies play in perpetuating inequality. A rhetorical analysis of Character "Matters!", the character education policy of a school board in Ontario, Canada, provides an…

In this paper, we demonstrate how history informs how policy meanings are constructed and the rhetorical strategies used to convince others to accept these meanings. We have two goals: (a) to show how a group of non-governmental actors, People for Education, became part of Ontario, Canada's policy discursive network; and (b) to demonstrate the…

Constructing a policy web of relationships is proposed as a useful way to identify and understand complex relationships between policies and their contexts. In Canada, the province of Ontario's "Character Development Initiative" (CDI) and its relationships to student achievement, citizenship education, and safe schools policies provide…

Public school districts in Buffalo, USA and Toronto, Canada reviewed their safe schools policies in 2008. Revised Codes of Conduct are compared to earlier versions and each other, and a conceptual policy web is used to understand how local, state/provincial, national, and international influences affect local safe school policies. The comparison…

Ontario, Canada's new character education policy is analyzed to determine how it supports and undermines critical democratic commitments to diversity, dialogue, equity, critical mindedness, and social justice. While policies are always open to interpretation, recent reform policies requiring evidence of continual improvement in students' academic…