In May 2019, the British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF) hosted a one-day seminar entitled "Questioning the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Education 2030 Program." The seminar provided a space to critically explore the Education 2030 program and the general approach to global standards through…

The High Performing Systems for Tomorrow (HPST) was a three-year partnership among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), and a select group of education leaders, including Directors-General, Deputy Ministers, senior advisors, and others, from among a group of…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden's education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost, in both independent and public schools. This two-pronged study first examines to what extent the…

It has been a key goal to achieve equity in education in Australia and Norway over the last 50 years. This article offers a historical case-oriented comparative analysis of the promotion of equity in education in these 2 countries. While equity in education is primarily understood as students' learning outcomes in national and international tests,…

This paper examines the development and administration of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools--a new testing instrument of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development--to demonstrate the relevance of heterarchical processes to educational governance. Drawing suggestively across new "relational"…

In his 1847 "Report on a System of Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada", Egerton Ryerson stated that public education was created in Canada to ensure that youth were prepared for their "appropriate duties and employments of life … as persons of business, and also as members of the civil community in which they live."…

In this article, we experiment with the idea of combining path dependency, convergence and contingency in explaining Finnish distinctiveness in education policy and politics since the early 1990s. The focus of this article is on quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) in comprehensive schooling. We elaborate on and contextualise the Finnish QAE…

In this paper, the authors begin by classifying the arguments that assert American schools are relatively inefficient into two categories: the "long-term trend argument" and the "international comparison argument." Their focus herein is on the latter of these two. They then describe two frameworks for approaching either of…

Policymakers worldwide are trying to figure how best to organize, govern, and support their education systems. They must manage multiple goals, such as workforce development, nurturing knowledgeable citizens, and ensuring educational opportunity. Some countries approach these issues with a public investment in teacher professionalization and a…

This article reveals perspectives based on experiences from twentieth-century Danish educational history by outlining contemporary, test-based accountability regime characteristics and their implications for education policy. The article introduces one such characteristic, followed by an empirical analysis of the origins and impacts of test-based…

The Finnish educational system is known for its equality. However, in many key areas in national and international assessments, Swedish-language schools in Finland have lagged behind their Finnish-language counterparts. So far there is little research into the underlying reasons for this discrepancy. In this article, in order to illuminate the…

Every three years the focus of the international education community shifts to the release of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). No other international study of education commands as much attention as PISA. In an age of intense global…

The aim of this study is to examine whether the expansion of higher education across countries is associated with the growth of shadow education as a function of families' efforts to ensure attainment of educational opportunities. To address this research objective, this study samples approximately 163,000 students, nested in 21 Organization for…

This author states that, since the civil rights movement, Americans have documented and decried--but done little to decrease--the achievement gap. This gulf, one of many that divide people by race and class, has festered in part because the larger question of inequitable investment in poor communities of color has long been neglected.…

In 2010, when the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's (OECD) released its 2009 PISA results, the big story was that eight of the top ten performing systems were Asian. Almost everyone overlooked the strong performance of Canada: sixth overall and the highest English-speaking and French-speaking nation in the world. The four…