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The author examines the experiences of learning about Japanese elementary education from the perspective of a Canadian teacher. She suggests through a year-long study in a Japanese third grade classroom that the teaching practices and philosophies underlying curricular and pedagogical decisions made by teachers are shaped by the culture and society of which schools are part, such that learning about Japanese schooling highlights the influence of social, societal, cultural, linguistic factors outside, as well as inside, school. In line with narrative inquiry research practices, the author also acknowledges her own stance as a certified elementary level teacher who was educated and certified in Canada, in contributing to shaping her analysis of teacher knowledge of her teacher participants. She argues that the process of learning about schooling in a country or culture different from the one in which an individual was educated and learned to teach, involves immersing oneself into the research context to learn about the experience from the perspective an insider. Realization of the extent to which this expansive interweaving of school and society is apparent in many aspects of schooling in Japan, in turn, reinforces the idea that this interconnection may also underlie schooling in other societies as well, such that one's experiences in one's own culture may form the foundation for understanding and interpreting knowledge gained about schooling in another culture or community. The notion of cross-cultural teacher knowledge, then, may be grounded in personal and professional experience of teaching and being taught in one's own culture.

This chapter focuses on a new school-level instrument for international benchmarking and policy learning – the OECD’s PISA-based Test for Schools (“PISA for Schools”) – and how it helps to constitute new global spaces and relations of education policymaking and governance. Unlike main PISA, PISA for Schools assesses school performance in reading, mathematics, and science against the schooling systems measured by the main PISA test. Schools are thus positioned within a globally commensurate space of measurement and comparison, and are encouraged to engage with, and learn from, the policy expertise proffered by “high-performing” international schooling systems and the OECD itself. Drawing suggestively across literature and theorizing around new spatialities associated with globalization, the “becoming topological” of culture and “power-topologies,” and informed by document analysis and interviews with 33 policy actors from across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, the chapter examines how PISA for Schools helps the OECD to directly “reach into” local schooling spaces. This respatialized PISA for Schools, or “PISA to Schools”, provides the OECD with the means to influence how schooling is practised and conceived at the level of local policy implementation, while limiting mediation by national and/or subnational politics. Moreover, the school-to-system performance comparisons enabled by PISA for Schools arguably provide one of the first – if not the only – international data-driven catalysts of school-level reform. This furthers the relevance and diffusion of “lessons” from main PISA and the OECD to schools themselves, and helps extend the epistemic communities through which the OECD practices its global epistemological governance of education.

The article investigates the language and rhetoric used by school inspectors as leverage in determining the direction for professional practice among teachers in colonial Trinidad and Tobago. The approach is ethnohistorical, and the database comprises major evaluation reports of the inspectors in question in respect of one school over a 20‐year period. The research reveals that the rhetoric employed in reporting was a major vehicle in transmitting important messages about professional practice which local teachers could not afford to ignore. The practice adopted imparted distinctiveness to the schooling system at the time, and a significant observation in the process is that the rhetoric used was laced with the language of “performativity” spawned and justified within a technical rationalism constructed and put to work in the colonial period”. Technical rhetoric, the paper argues however, is not the type of medium required to do justice to education, generally recognized as a social practice enterprise.

This paper applies concepts from organizational theory as well as physics to elucidate the role of time in the US education system’s efforts to recuperate from the pandemic. This paper contributes to an important body of work focusing on implementation of reform efforts in education that use time in innovative ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted time in educational organizations and, thus, for educators and students. Time has been a vital tool for educational reform, yet many applications of organizational theory and literature on educational change neglect to underscore its importance. The authors explore resources, guidelines and practices related to time employed to recuperate from pandemic-related disruptions to schooling.

The authors discuss three cases in which time has been utilized to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) accelerated learning; (2) extended time; and (3) redeveloped professional learning. For each case, the authors demonstrate how time has been conceptualized and how leaders are stretching the space-time of schooling to provide resources and learning opportunities to students and educators.

This article describes how district and school leaders can draw on their agency to reshape time-use in educational organizations.

This article advances an innovative framework demonstrating the importance of time in educational change. The authors also portray innovative models that provide time for students to receive an array of responsive, equity-centered, academic and SEL opportunities and for educators to collaborate, continuing their own development amid the ever-shifting Covid-context.

As the Australian working class continues its decline, sociological and historical scholarship has begun to focus more on the middle class. The purpose of this paper is to explore the historiography and social theory concerning the middle class, and argues that the ways in which middle class families use schools have been a powerful force in the formation of that class.

This paper reviews the author’s own work on this topic, the work of other scholars, and suggests a number of social practices that middle class families employ as they school their children.

The ways that many families operate in relation to the schooling of their children constitute a significant set of social class practices, that in turn assist in the continuing formation of the middle class itself. The social and policy history of schooling can expose the origins of these practices.

This paper originated as an invited key-note address. It retains characteristics associated with that genre, in this case putting less emphasis on new research and more on a survey of the field.

In the early twenty-first century, the relevance of social class analysis for understanding a great range of social and historical phenomena is in retreat. This paper argues the continuing importance of that kind of analysis.

Under-examination of the notion of competition between schools has created a considerable asymmetry between the reality and the literature of schooling. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the validity of school competition and verify the propositions regarding the effects of school marketing practices in literature, particularly Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) and aided schools in Hong Kong.

It tests the relationships between student intake and school academic performance and school marketing practices. It also compares the pattern of the relationships between the DSS and aided secondary schools. Secondary data from 441 secondary schools were retrieved from a popular secondary school admission magazine in Hong Kong and from the schools’ websites.

Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that the school’s academic performance was positively related to discretionary student intake. In addition, marketing school academic performance, but not marketing school features, was positively related to student intake. At last, it was found that marketing school academic performance intensified the relationship between the school’s academic performance and student intake in aided schools but not in DSS schools. The results were interpreted as demonstrating that school competition in Hong Kong is a battle of lifting academic performance.

This study is potential and worthwhile in at least two ways. First, testing the relationships of student intake with academic performance and school marketing practices helps to verify the notion of school competition in the education sector, which, in turn, can bridge the gap between the practice and literature of schooling. Second, examining school competition in Hong Kong can help to identify an important contextual reality for future scholars whose research site is located in Hong Kong.

In terms of education attainment in the United Kingdom, the white working class remains the lowest performing ethnic group, and their academic underperformance has ominous implications for their long-term life chances. This chapter investigates how white working-class boys experience pathologization and deficit discourses in their schooling as they negotiate the discipline structures in three educational sites in South London (two state comprehensive schools and one Pupil Referral Unit). Drawing upon empirical data from an in-depth sociological study of 23 white working-class boys (Stahl, 2015), this chapter makes theoretical connections between how pathologization – both within the school and wider society – contributes to how these young men become constructed with and through deficit discourses contributing significantly toward low academic achievement. Where whiteness often equates to power and entitlement, in the schooling contexts of this study whiteness was often socially constructed as undesirable and equated with low aspirations, stagnation, and antieducational stances.

The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling.

It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools.

It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling.

Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

The purpose of this paper is to show how Nigeria's current Universal Basic Education on primary schooling targets Muslim Almajiri street boys for basic literacy acquisition. The paper examines the policy's management implementation practices and challenges, as well as provides policy options that may minimize discrepancies for effective management.

The discussion is guided by preliminary qualitative studies using phenomenology research philosophy to better understand the social realities of the boys' schooling. Using a descriptive case study approach, two schools in a major city of northern Nigeria served as research sites. Data collection process involved informal interviews, active observations, and discussions with a purpose with four boys, and two teachers as primary participants. Data analysis engaged the generation of themes from the transcribed interview and personal observation field notes, with major ones as challenges and policy options of the program implementation.

Major findings include the boys' adoption to the free lunch feeding policy as motivation to partial school attendance. Management shortcomings of the synergy include ineffective communication and collaboration, poor instructional supervision and cultural insensitivity to boys' school retention. Remedies to the shortcomings are reviewed as policy options in the article.

The paper concludes that effective management strategies as communication and collaboration with community stakeholders, frequencies of instructional supervision are vital to schooling inclusion of the boys in primary schools. The article provides workable data for future modification of the policy.

So far, no program assessment on this schooling synergy has been investigated. This article attempts to bridge the gap between ground level realities and policy implementation methodologies of the government on the schooling of Almajiris.