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Conventional wisdom has it that policymakers rationally approach an ongoing or potential problem, carefully consider the reasons for the problem, and then sensibly debate the information and research on this problem. The final stage of this ideal vision of the educational policymaking process is that the policymakers decide how to solve specific problems based on their consideration of all of the relevant data and possible options (Vickers, 1994). This is rarely, if ever, the case.

This chapter takes a look at the evolution of Egypt’s educational system under different regimes that were in power during the years of 1954–2011. By analyzing the education policy under the regimes of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar El Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak, the chapter aims to show how different ideologies have influenced the educational system and the larger goals of social development in the country. In particular, the chapter will highlight the “open door policy” of economic liberalization and the abolishment of the guaranteed government employment policy for graduates that was initiated by Anwar El Sadat and continued during the Mubarak’ era. This became one of the factors that led to growing resentment against state’s policy and fueled the revolution in 2011. The chapter will conclude that the historical context provides a lens to understand the complexity of how education systems are formed and reformed under various regimes and ideologies, and the ensuing consequences of social inequity. What remains to be seen is how educational policy will be shaped in post-revolution Egypt.

More than five years have passed since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983 by then‐Secretary of Education Terrance Bell's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Those years have seen the publication of an enormous body of both primary material, composed of research reports, essays, and federal and state reform proposals and reports; and secondary material, composed of summaries and reviews of the original reform reports and reports about effective programs that are based on reform recommendations. This annotated bibliography seeks to identify, briefly describe, and organize in a useful manner those publications dealing with K‐12 education reform and improvement. The overall purposes of this article are to bring organization to that list, and also to trace relationships and influences from the federal initiatives to the states and professional associations, and from there to the school districts and individual schools.

The shift from data-informed to data-driven educational policymaking is conceptually framed by institutional and transhumanist perspectives. Examples of the shift to large-scale quantitative data driving educational decision-making suggest that data-driven educational policy will not adjust for context to the degree as done by the data-informed or data-based policymaking. Instead, the algorithmization of educational decision-making is both increasingly realizable and necessary in light of the overwhelmingly big data on education produced annually around the world. Evidence suggests that the isomorphic shift from localized data and individual decision-making about education to large-scale assessment data has changed the nature of educational decision-making and national educational policy. Big data are increasingly legitimized in educational policy communities at national and international levels, which means that algorithms are assumed to be the best way to analyze and make decisions about large volumes of complex data. There is a conceptual concern, however, that decontextualized or de-humanized educational policies may have the effect of increasing student achievement, but not necessarily the translation of knowledge into economically, socially, or politically productive behavior.

The rapid expansion of national participation in international achievement studies has been a hallmark of educational accountability and planning in countries around the world for the past 25 years. Since the IEA's first international studies on mathematics and science achievement in the late 1960s, the availability and use of international achievement studies for national education policy has exploded (DeBoer, “Why the Fireworks?: Theoretical Perspectives on the Explosion in International Assessments”; Smith & Baker, 2001; Wiseman & Baker, 2005). The most widely adopted studies are now administered on regular cycles and include participating countries from every region and level of development around the world.

This chapter addresses international educational governance by exploring some of the factors contributing to increasingly internationalized national educational policymaking and the ways that related trends in educational policymaking either constrain or shift to meet particular needs and challenges within specific national contexts. After discussing the phenomenon and the impact of globalization on international educational governance, the role of the state, and some examples of both contextualization and bounded rationality, the impact of national policy convergence is discussed. This chapter concludes by summarizing the ways that national policy convergence became the focus of international educational governance and national educational policy based on the same ideas and structure through seemingly different implementation, but often-identical measurable outcomes. Examples from Japan and Saudi Arabia highlight the discussion.