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The coming of Big Data is offered as a salve that will reduce global inequalities and grow national economies. The chapter pursues how notions of progress have traveled into schooling through technology and generate differences and exclusions in the past and present. The chapter explores how transnational school reforms during the colonial era were directed to adapting education to “the African,” which connected expertise in the U.S., UK, and Africa through a shared set of standards, principles, and values about what constituted civilization and development. In school reforms today, the “African” has disappeared today in favor of the “all”; however, residues of educational values and judgments that made up the African as a peculiar and pathological target of colonial schooling still haunt the present. The chapter argues that today’s transnational school reforms continue to presume target communities are passive, pathological objects whose transformation depends upon their learning to act rationally. Whereas in the past this was envisioned as individuals’ and communities’ assimilation through surveys and questionnaires, today rationality is managed through integration in systems and optimizing users’ choices through data mining and algorithms. The narrative of data as grounding rational thought and action is a seductive one that offers optimism to schooling; however, faith in the coming of technology impairs historical reflection and ethical reflexivity toward schooling’s values and judgments, and the differences and exclusions they generate.

In this chapter, the interest is directed towards how transnational policy messages (supra-level) can be tracked down through analyses of curriculum policy discourses at the national (macro-level) and municipal level (meso-level) in the Swedish school system. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, and organizational and institutional theory, we analyse central policy messages in the introduction of the national Swedish standards-based curriculum reform for compulsory school from 2011, focusing on discourses of communication between local authorities (meso-level) and schools (micro-level) within their area of responsibility for curriculum making. Two main features emerge. The local curriculum reform agenda is significantly shaped by the argument that explicit standards together with systematic governance through evaluation and accountability will increase students' performance. The second feature underlines strong accountability as a prerequisite for equity and equivalence and the importance of the local school authority for the organization of schooling, structural support and interventions for curriculum making in schools. Equity and equivalence are a challenge for the local authorities. They have problems to support curriculum making which tends to create considerable variations in how the curriculum reform is enacted in the different schools of the municipality.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Teacher effectiveness and teacher quality have become the focus of intense international attention and national concern. Dozens of nations are implementing a diverse set of strategies that aim to improve the quality of education by improving the quality of teachers. These efforts have not been well coordinated, and as the authors in this volume show, core constructs of quality have not been well defined. In this introductory chapter, we discuss why teachers are now “under the microscope” of policymaker’s attention and elaborate how the chapters in this volume identify particularly fruitful avenues for further study. The assembled chapters address two complex questions: (1) what existing cross-national measures of teacher effectiveness and teacher quality are most promising and how can these be aligned to maximize their research potential? and (2) what core constructs of teacher quality or effectiveness are missing from the evidence-base, and how can cross-national comparative research help refine these? To investigate these questions, the chapters in this volume address different aspects of “quality.” While quality may be politically contested, there is a significant need to continue to articulate a truly global perspective on teacher quality. The authors look at a wide range of aspects of quality in order to advance thinking about teacher education, instructional quality and workforce or organizational conditions that affect quality; to analyze instruments, tools, or measures used to assess quality; and identify what measures need to be developed further. We also note how scholarly study of the spread of transnational teacher reforms has failed to keep pace with national policy changes regarding teacher quality, and advance a more general theory of the forces affecting national policymakers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine expert ideas about education for citizenship in 1930s Australia. Drawing on a larger study of adolescence and schooling during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the paper explores the role of international networks and US philanthropy in fostering the spread of new psychological and curriculum ideas that shaped citizenship education, and broader educational changes during the interwar period. A second purpose is to provide historical perspectives on contemporary concerns about the role of schooling in addressing social values and student wellbeing.

The discussion is informed by approaches drawn from Foucauldian genealogy and historical studies of transnationalism. It examines constructions of the good and problem student and the networks of international educational expertise as forms of “travelling ideas”. These transnational exchanges are explored through a close analysis of a defining moment in Australian educational history, the 1937 conference of the New Education Fellowship.

The analysis reveals the ways in which psychological understandings and curriculum reforms shaped education for citizenship in the 1930s and identify in particular the emergent role of psychology in defining what it meant to be a good student and a good future citizen. The paper further finds that Australian education during the interwar years was more cosmopolitan and engaged in international discussions about citizenship and schooling than is usually remembered in the present. Elaborating this is important for building transnational histories of knowledge exchange in Australian education.

The paper shows the value of a relational analysis of school curriculum and psychological understandings for more fully grasping the different dimensions of education for citizenship both in the interwar years and now. It offers fresh perspectives on contemporary educational debates about globalisation and youth identities, as played out in current concerns about social values and schooling.

The principal goal of the article is to examine how Singapore, one of the East Asian tiger economies, has attempted to diversify its higher education system by developing “transnational education” in the island state.

With particular reference to the most recent education reforms and changing higher education governance in Singapore, this article focuses on how the Singapore government has changed its higher education governance models in enhancing the global competitiveness of its higher education system by adopting more pro‐competition policy instruments and allowing the growth of transnational education in the city state.

The findings suggest the choice of policy tools (the choice of market forces in higher education and the rise of transnational education in the present case) is highly political and governments should pay particular attention to the particular socio‐economic and socio‐political contexts of their countries when making such choices.

The paper shows that the role of government in East Asia is still important, especially when there is a strong need for government to set up appropriate regulations, social protection and welfare, hence, governments in East Asia are very much conceived as a complement to the markets.

The national core curriculum is renewed in Finland approximately every ten years, the most recent one being 2016. The core curriculum sets the general goals, providing the foundation for district- and school level curriculum development work (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). The messages from transnational educational policy (e.g. OECD) are apparent in the core curriculum. However, districts, schools and teachers are highly autonomous in upholding, resourcing and deciding about the curriculum making at the local sites of activity. Accordingly, the curriculum making relies heavily on shared sense-making as a tool for cultivating transformative learning throughout the educational system. The chapter draws on the results of the national “School Matters” research project (2014-2018), to provide the meta-analysis of the sense-making in national curriculum making. Results suggested that the shared sense-making focused on engaging educational practitioners in learning at all layers of the system. However, the means for facilitating shared sense-making between the different layers of the system and curriculum was perceived to be less coherent by the stakeholders at the district and school level, than at the state level. This implies that the educational providers should not only be involved in co-creation of the aims, contents and values of the curriculum document, but also in designing novel and ecologically valid ways for orchestrating the complex and dynamic curriculum making.

Research has already uncovered a great deal of evidence about the individual and organizational qualities that enhance effective teaching and the kinds of qualifications (attributes) that are associated with effective teaching and learning. From a research perspective, increased precision and specificity in the definition and refinement of specific concepts (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge) will increase academic knowledge about the relationship between teacher characteristics, working conditions, and the quality of instruction that takes place. This knowledge may have little effect on policy formation. From a policy perspective, a holistic or organic conception of teacher quality will be critical for effective policy formation and implementation. At some point, academic knowledge about different aspects of effective or “quality” teaching need to be connected to a general concept of a quality teacher in order to be effectively inserted into policy debates and the general media. Systematic use of academic knowledge is often hindered by either the narrow focus of the research, or by its limited application to actual teacher practice. In spite of these limitations in academic research, there are areas where academics, policymakers, and practitioners have achieved consensus or are converging on shared constructs of promise. In other areas, both academic and political debates seem locked into conflict over constructs related to teacher quality. Identifying these three broad categories of consensus, convergence, and conflict provides a broad framework to assess the kinds of research and the kinds of reform that need to be carried out in order to promote and sustain teachers’ development and implementation of their professional skills in the classroom.