School Reform Research Articles

Examining trends in school segregation in compulsory and upper secondary education in Sweden: the showcase of an urban school market

ABSTRACT Educational success is central to the life chances of young people, but increasing differences in student achievement between schools are commonly attributed to increasing school segregation. The aim of the study was to examine the trends in socioeconomic, ethnic, and academic segregation in compulsory and upper secondary education in the Gothenburg school market between 1998 and 2020. Utilizing register data from the Gothenburg Longitudinal Database (n = 1 662 166), the study showed that school segregation intensified over time and across education levels, particularly in the Gothenburg municipality and upper secondary education. The geography of upper secondary education becomes more clustered after stricter upper secondary qualifications are implemented. These findings are discussed in relation to the Swedish school reforms that resulted in the materialization and expansion of the school market with a significant increase in school provisions, leading to the (re-)production of unjust geographies.

Scientification or political legitimation? Tracing the concepts of evidence and context in Nordic school reforms

ABSTRACT Presenting education reforms as evidence-based has become a global trend. This article investigates how evidence is selected and utilised, focusing on the role of academic research in recent school reforms in Denmark, Finland, and Norway. By analysing a dataset of fifteen interviews of policymakers and applying Sobe, Noah. W., and Jamie A. Kowalzcyk's (2012. “The Problem of Context in Comparative Education Research.” ECPS Journal 6:55–74), concept of Context, the findings reveal that experts and committee members selected different types of evidence for various reform topics based on their professional backgrounds, roles, positions, and the specific issues at hand. The decision-making processes were complex negotiations involving people from diverse networks and professions who interpret global ideas within local contexts. Consequently, the choice of evidence was shaped by and shaped further the unique Context of each reform, despite the shared commonalities among the three countries.

Hybridity as a governmental technique for designing and delivering NAPLAN in Australian schools

AbstractThis paper explores the utility of hybrid governance as an analytical lens for understanding policy design and delivery in Australian schooling reform. Using the National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) as a case study, we argue that its design and delivery processes exemplify hybridity in myriad dimensions. In a federal system in which national schooling reform relies upon negotiation and consensus building amongst a multiplicity of government and non‐government stakeholders, we argue that NAPLAN's hybridity serves as a governmental technique for managing and sustaining collaborative governance arrangements. Hybridity also supports the standardised implementation of the assessment across diverse schooling systems and sectors. While NAPLAN's hybridity generates strategic benefits for Australian governments, it also produces risks. A challenge for policymakers is to harness its benefits while ensuring transparent decision‐making and clear responsibilities and accountabilities. To address risks and leverage opportunities, we argue there are benefits to having a convening agency with authority to manage and sustain hybrid networks at the national scale.Points for practitioners Hybrid governance offers productive insights into how Australian governments work collaboratively to design and deliver national schooling reforms. The National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is an exemplary case study for examining hybrid governance in the Australian federation. Hybrid governance serves as a technique for managing and sustaining collaborative governance arrangements at the national scale and for ensuring NAPLAN's implementation is standardised across Australia's diverse subnational schooling systems and sectors. Hybridity creates risks and opportunities. A challenge for policymakers is to harness its benefits while ensuring transparent decision‐making and clear responsibilities and accountabilities. There are benefits to having a convening agency with authority to manage and sustain hybrid networks at the national scale.

The challenges of the process of implementing the New Secondary Education (NEM) through Law No. 13.415-2017 at the School of Application of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA)

The text deals with Law no. 13,415/2017, which approved the recent High School Reform, modifying the organization of basic schools. The objective is to analyze the challenges of the process of implementing the New Secondary Education (NEM) through Law no. 13.415/2017 at the School of Application of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA). The methodology was based on bibliographical research, the results of which reveal that EAUFPA has been restructuring itself, in its entirety, in aspects of management, infrastructure and organization, in order to improve its pedagogical process considering new demands, with a focus on secondary education.

Forms of culture in the implementation of school reform efforts: A conceptual framework

Despite concerted efforts to improve educational practices through reform, classroom implementation remains a persistent challenge. This theoretical article draws on recent work in cultural sociology to offer a fresh perspective on this problem. It introduces a framework that differentiates between declarative, procedural, and public forms of culture, highlighting their unique mechanisms of internalization and enactment. This multidimensional understanding of culture reveals the cognitive challenges inherent in translating reform principles into classroom practices. More specifically, the article contends that the common assumptions of convertibility and transferability between these forms of culture underlie the limited success of many reform initiatives. By attending to the cognitive dimensions of cultural dynamics, the proposed framework opens new avenues for understanding and addressing the difficulties of educational change. This article concluded with an agenda for future research to test and refine the framework.

Funded, then forgotten: politics, public memory and national school reform

ABSTRACT Governments apply education policies and funding compacts to shape school reform. Yet, once agreements are endorsed and ratified, the ongoing commitment to the enactment of agreed education reforms can be ‘forgotten’. In this paper, the Australian National School Reform Agreement is examined as an illustrative example of the ways in which policy promises are articulated by politicians as key policy actors. We draw on Wodak’s discursive analytic framework, alongside Ricoeur’s conceptualisation of the ‘forgetfulness’ of collective public memory to demonstrate how successive politicians have attempted to frame public discourse through official ministerial pronouncements in ways that obscured earlier promises. By focusing on key discourses surrounding funding, achievement and equity, and collaboration, politicians have sought to redefine public accounts of school reform in deliberate ways, in which politics takes priority over policymaking. In doing so, politicians work as key educational policy actors who seek to discursively shape public sentiment and collective memory regarding school reform. Given the increasing emphasis on national school reform in Australia and elsewhere, it is important to ‘remember’ the need to work towards more deliberative mediations of national school reform, in which the purpose and value of policymaking is rendered purposefully in the collective public memory.

The aporia of education policy: national school reform and the limits of policy enactment

ABSTRACT In this paper, we deploy the concept of aporia to consider the ways in which enactments of policy become ‘stuck’ as policy flows between national and sub-national education systems. We illustrate the overlapping political, governmental and bureaucratic spheres of influence that mediate how national school reform agendas are received and enacted by schooling systems. Our analysis is based on interviews with senior bureaucrats from an Australian non-government sector’s national and state peak bodies representing Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Drawing on conceptualisations of aporia as an impasse and more deliberatively, Lather’s interpretation of aporia as ‘moments of possibility’, we argue that aporias created by bureaucratic barriers, government timelines, government evaluation processes and the placement of accountability measures over schooling prevents the meaningful enactment of policy within school settings. We argue that there is a need to consider the generative possibilities that exist within this situation of policy aporia, and demarcate where possibilities to move beyond ‘stuck’ policy might arise.

Navigating priorities: Assessing the challenges of curriculum reform in Turkish Urban and Regional Planning Schools

Planning departments in Türkiye recently witnessed a boom. In less than 20 years, the number of universities offering urban planning programs increased from a dozen to 45, most accepting students with limited resources. Urban planning education has faced many challenges over the last two decades, and offering education with limited resources carried this problem to another level, increasing concerns among scholars about the quality of the education and the learning outcomes a planner should possess at graduation. While planning schools in Türkiye deals with the issues above, global debates in planning education revolve around integrating topics such as climate change, inequality, informality, and decolonization into the curriculum. This study aimed to reveal to what extent global issues find their way into Turkish planning school agendas in an environment where more pressing matters threaten the quality of education. To look further into this issue, all documents published by TUPOB (Türkiye Planning Schools Association) since its foundation were analyzed, and seven in-depth interviews with TUPOB members were conducted. A predominantly qualitative approach was utilized. The findings suggest that the lack of resources is the most critical problem for urban planning schools, followed by insufficient teaching faculty. The curriculum updates and integration of global issues such as climate change and urban poverty come later in the priorities list. This research showed that concerns regarding resources and lack of standards take precedence over global discussions in planning curricula.

Comparing two transfer spaces over time and against a global script: the case of school-autonomy-with-accountability

ABSTRACT The study compares the selective adoption of the global school-autonomy-with-accountability (SAWA) reform in two cantons of Switzerland (Zurich and St. Gallen) over the period 1995–2015. The authors dissect the SAWA reform into three aspects: its theory of change, its bundle of policies, and its preferred policy instruments to achieve and sustain change. Methodologically, the study draws on a database of over 1,200 policy-relevant documents and expert interviews related to the so-called ‘outcomes-oriented school reform’ (German: wirkungsorientierte Schulreform) or SAWA, respectively. In an endeavor to advance research on policy borrowing, the authors propose a distinction between six temporal features of policy transfer: time, timing, tempo, lifespan, age, and sequence. They find that SAWA’s neoliberal theory of change was not adopted. However, select policies and instruments were transferred and translated into the Swiss context. Furthermore, some policies expanded over time (standardized testing), some were dropped after a while (performance pay), some were kept on the books but, with age, hollowed out over time (external evaluation), and some were long-lived and were institutionalized (professional school management).

Transcending attitudes: teacher responses to professional development in trauma-informed education

The adoption of trauma-informed practices in schools is a significant and growing area of school reform efforts. It has been assumed that professional development aimed at influencing teacher attitudes toward trauma-informed care in schools is an important first step in adopting trauma-informed practices and improving student and school outcomes. However, there are gaps in the literature assessing the impact of trauma-informed professional development on teacher attitudes toward trauma-informed care, and there is little evidence linking changes in teacher attitudes to changes in practices. This exploratory study assessed teacher responses to a year-long pilot program providing intensive professional development and consultation on trauma-informed practices in one urban elementary school in the U.S. Southwest. Findings raise questions about the impact of professional development on teacher attitudes and subsequent changes to practice.

Invisible Resistance: BIPOC Girls and Gender-expansive Youth in Foster Care Resisting School Push Out

This article explores that girls and gender-expansive youth who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in foster care resist oppression in schools. Research demonstrates that this population is disproportionately impacted by systemic oppression which contributes to poor academic outcomes. The child welfare system, largely operating on gendered and racialized stereotypes, targets women of color, resulting in higher rates of foster care involvement for girls and gender-expansive youth. In schools, the same stereotypes are used as reasons to surveil and punish youth, channeling them into juvenile detention. However, BIPOC girls and gender-expansive youth in foster care are rendered invisible in school discipline literature. This paper, adapted from my dissertation, utilizes observations in K-12 education to explore youth resistance to hegemonic power structures in school, and illuminates the importance of leveraging positionality when supporting youth. While my research is ongoing, this piece demonstrates that youth in foster care are made to protect themselves in school in ways that are deemed unacceptable, and subsequently criminalized. Ultimately, this work indicates the need for both school reform and structural social change to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

Cultural roots of the myopia boom in Confucian Asia and their implications.

Current evidence implicates educational pressures and reduced outdoor time as major causes of myopia. This paper examines the ongoing battle against the myopia epidemic in East Asia, including its cultural offshoots such as Singapore, where over 80% of young adults are myopic. East Asian societies share deeply rooted Confucian values that attach great importance to education and familial obligations, with heavy parental investment in education and the perception that academic excellence reflects filial piety. Coupled with a strong emphasis on standardised test results, East Asian children face intense educational pressures from a young age. Existing education-based myopia prevention strategies focus either on top-down school reforms to promote more outdoor time for studentsduring school hours oron bottom-up awareness initiatives encouraging lifestyle changes. However, the entrenched Confucian worldview suggests that more extensive top-down reforms aimed at reducing competition in education, combined with widespread bottom-up awareness initiatives targeting the public-particularly parents, given their active involvement in children's education outside of school-may be required to truly turn the tide on myopia.

Healthier School Systems for Learners: Government Role in Fostering Holistic Interventions

Background: School health is a key component of school reform, and it is essential to address health issues that are relevant to education and incorporate key actors such as the government and other relevant stakeholders. This review article aimed to examine the role of governments in fostering healthier school systems for learners. Methods: This paper examined existing literature, policies, and programs and identified effective approaches to promoting holistic well-being within educational settings. Scientific databases, including Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science, and the websites of international organizations including the WHO, UNESCO, and UNICEF were searched. Results: Through case studies and best practices from different regions including Nepal, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Ghana, and Kenya, this review illustrated the potential impact of government-led initiatives in promoting school health. In this regard, health impact assessment can help policymakers understand the health implications of their policies and identify ways to improve health while minimizing harm. The government’s role includes enactment and assessment of policies that improve school programs, establishing accountability and regulatory framework, facilitating decision-making, collaborations with other stakeholders, and coordination. Conclusion: This article provided insights and recommendations for policymakers seeking to prioritize the health and development of students in their jurisdictions. Implementing the school health program is essential for achieving both the nation’s goal of health for all and the sustainable development goals.

Analyzing how well an equity-based, inclusive school reform strategy with MTSS integration can improve the math and reading performance of students with IEPs

Equity-based investments provide a long-term potential for substantial returns. In the long run, stocks have performed better than a lot of other investing options, including bonds or cash. It's important to keep in mind that past performance does not guarantee future results, and there may be ups and downs in the stock market. The goal of the current research was to determine Would a broad, based on stocks educational transformation paradigm nestled inside an Multi-Tiered System Of Support (MTSS) framework might increase the arithmetic and reading test scores of children with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). According to descriptive data, pupils with IEPs had higher math state test results throughout the implementation period. The scores were strongly and positively predicted by model fidelity of implementation scores. Students with IEPs improved their math scores in implementing schools in faster rate’s compared with their counterparts in comparable educational institutions, according to a subsequent analysis comparing The approach's efficacy in three institutions that used it faithfully enough compared to non-implementing institutions. The findings on inclusivity as well as the steps taken to enable high-fidelity MTSS adoption are discussed. The consequences were included reform’s approach with the integration go beyond math and reading outcomes, even though this research concentrated exclusively on these areas.

The Conif Matrix and the curricular restructuring of the Integrated High School courses offered by Ifal

This paper analyzes how Conif's Budget Matrix, approved to take effect as of 2019, guided the curricular restructuring of the Integrated High School courses offered by the Federal Institutes. We seek to demonstrate how, through the economic bias, the Executive Government encouraged the Federal Institutes to restructure the curricula of the Integrated High School courses, reducing the curricula and bringing them closer to what is proclaimed in the High School Reform. To this end, we analyzed the curricular restructuring of these courses that took place at the Federal Institute of Alagoas – Ifal, starting in 2018.

Turning the page on energy poverty? Quasi-experimental evidence on education and energy poverty in Zimbabwe

We investigate the long-term causal effects of education on energy poverty among households headed by men and women, leveraging the 1980 Zimbabwe school reform as a quasi-experiment. This reform, which significantly expanded educational opportunities for all children, serves as an ideal setting for assessing the impact of education on energy poverty within a regression discontinuity design, with age at reform determining exposure. Exposure to the reform resulted in a 2.08-year average increase in schooling and a 28.3 percentage point (pp) increase in the probability of completing secondary schooling. The reform's impact was more pronounced for women, increasing their schooling by 2.35 years (compared to 1.68 years for men) and for rural residents, with a 2.53-year increase (compared to 1.00 year for urban residents). A one-year increase in education reduces the risk of energy poverty by an estimated 8.56%, more pronounced among male-head families (5 pp) than among female-headed households (4.6 pp). This increased education enhances labour market outcomes, household economic status, infrastructure quality, and access to information and promotes progressive societal norms. These findings underscore education's crucial role in sustainable and gender-inclusive economic development, highlighting the potential of educational policy in reducing energy poverty and advancing gender equality in low-income countries.

Charter school reform in Abu Dhabi: policy borrowing, translation and frenemies

ABSTRACT This research investigates the implementation of charter schools in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the effects of this policy change on education workers. Operation by for-profit education management organisations shifts the government policy on UAE national students, changing the education governance of the government system to be more like that of local international schools. This research aimed to understand the reform based on the experiences of charter school administrators, schoolteachers, charter operator managers, and other stakeholders. The main findings relate to policy translation, policy mobilities, and the complexity of the relationship between for-profit school operators and the government regulator. The importance of this research is understanding how a government school system can be subsumed by an entirely private, for-profit education system.

Employee readiness for change: examining the combined effects of individual and organizational demands in public school reform

PurposeThe paper aims to clarify how work-specific characteristics at both the individual and organizational level influence professional civil servants’ readiness for change during the implementation of reforms in public administration. We examine the influence of work characteristics at the individual and organizational levels, such as reform-related strains, organizational climate, and organizational professionalism, on the employees’ response to change. In addition, we also consider the interaction between these specific work characteristics.Design/methodology/approachThis article employs a quantitative multi-level analysis to examine the influence of individual and collective predictors of employees' readiness for change. For our analysis, we used data from the evaluation of a school reform in Switzerland aimed at aligning teachers' working conditions with those of other administrative employees. The survey conducted for the evaluation includes responses from 2,162 teachers.FindingsOur study expands the understanding in public management research of work characteristics that either promote or reduce employees’ readiness for change in the public sector. Our findings suggest that the organizational level, in our case the school level, influences the individual’s response to change. Furthermore, the role of organizational professionalism in terms of a reform-related transformation of the identities, structures, and practices of the actors concerned is highlighted as a potential stressor and catalyst that reinforces the negative correlation between reform-related stress and willingness to change.Practical implicationsThis paper offers insights into how public managers can effectively overcome challenges in the implementation process of public school reforms. This also includes the awareness among change agents that positively associated changes at the organizational level may have negative consequences at the individual level, due to the fact that they affect professional understanding, for example, which may cause the affected actors to respond with resistance.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the small number of multi-level research studies on the responses to change in public administration and answers the call for research to investigate the hurdles that may arise when implementing change. Further, the paper contributes to the literature on the impact of new public management (NPM) on the identity of professional civil servants.

The Impact of Perceived Teacher Paternalistic Leadership on Voice Behavior Among College Students in Hebei Province, China

Student voice behavior is an important aspect of school culture. Raising awareness of student voice can support academic achievement and deepen school reforms, and this study explored the influence of college students’ perception of teacher-parent leadership on their voice behavior based on the Chinese cultural background. Based on social exchange theory, a convenience sampling method was applied to conduct a questionnaire survey on 709 college students from 5 universities in Hebei Province, China. After analyzing by SEM (Structural Equation Modeling), the study showed that: In teacher paternalistic leadership, benevolent leadership and moral leadership have a significant positive impact on voice behavior while authoritarian leadership has a meaningful negative impact. Therefore, teacher paternalistic leadership can provide psychological care and academic support for students, set a fair and moral example, and avoid making authoritarian decisions, providing a supportive voice environment for students.

Longer school schedules, childcare and the quality of mothers’ employment

Summary Better employment quality can improve personal well-being, social cohesion, and inclusive growth and development. Yet good quality jobs – associated with greater well-being – are less accessible to women than men. While it is understood that policies balancing family and work lead to greater female labour participation, this paper investigates whether one such policy – increased childcare – improves the quality of jobs where mothers are employed. The context we analyse is a nationwide school reform in Chile that extended school schedules for primary school-aged children, providing childcare services. We combine administrative data of the phase-in of the policy with panel data of individual mothers’ employment outcomes and socio-economic characteristics. We estimate a fixed-effects model that controls for mothers’ unobserved heterogeneity and identifies the effect of the policy from plausibly exogenous temporal and spatial variations in access to schools with long schedules and exogenous exposure to the policy. We find a positive effect of childcare on several measures of employment quality and gender gaps within the couple. Our evidence suggests that the mechanism driving the impact is the implicit subsidy to the cost of childcare, affecting the opportunity cost of mothers’ time. In addition, we find heterogeneous results by mothers’ education level. Access to childcare through longer primary school schedules can increase household welfare and can play a role in reducing income and gender inequalities.