Search

Purpose: This study introduces a policy with great strategic significance and far-reaching impact by analyzing the background, measures, and future development trends of teacher evaluation reform in China. Design/Approach/Methods: This study primarily conducts a policy text analysis of the section on teacher evaluation of the "Overall Plan for Deepening the Reform of Educational Evaluation in the New Era". Findings: The "Overall Plan for Deepening the Reform of Educational Evaluation in the New Era" was drafted to enhance the quality of Chinese teachers and address many problems in teacher evaluation. It comprised four sections: teachers' professional ethics, teaching effectiveness, evaluation models and methods, and honorary titles. The policy has distinctive features such as the high status and authority of the issuing body, a holistic and systematic nature, and an orientation toward practical issues. This article proposes three major policy foresights: promoting implementation through the force of political trends, giving schools autonomy in teacher evaluations, and implementing progressive reforms. Originality/Value: This study conducted a specialist analysis of the policy in combination with the real scenario and institutional environment of Chinese teacher evaluation, which could encourage international peers to better understand Chinese teacher evaluation policies and promote policy learning and dissemination internationally.

This study aims to assess the practice of institutional autonomy at Jimma University in Ethiopia. The study employed a mixed approach by collecting research data through a questionnaire, semi-structured interview, and document analysis. Two hundred and thirty-two randomly selected instructors and academic leaders were contacted through the questionnaire, and nine purposively selected informants were interviewed. The quantitative data were analyzed by using mean values, standard deviations, and independent sample t-tests, while the qualitative data were examined by identifying common codes and emerging themes. The findings indicated that organizational, academic, and financial autonomy practices were lower than formal autonomy. On the other hand, staff autonomy was relatively at a medium level, and the overall practice of institutional autonomy at Jimma University was poor. Thus, living autonomy was found to be different from formal autonomy. The study also found that the influence of the internal and external environment might contribute to the divergence. As a result, legal provisions could not guarantee the university's living autonomy, but the relationship between the environment and the university does. Therefore, in exercising university autonomy, educational leaders and managers should take the interface between the university and its environment into account.

This article examines the independent and interaction influence of organizational climate and the type of autonomous colleges on the academic performance of students. Organizational climate encompasses various elements such as leadership styles, communication patterns, and staff morale, collectively shaping the institutional environment. Autonomous colleges, with their capacity for innovation in curriculum design, pedagogical methods, and assessment practices, provide a unique context for this analysis. To explore the effect, researchers employed a quantitative approach, surveying 480 students across 12 colleges (both government and non-government) in Odisha, India. Questionnaires assessed student perceptions of organizational climate and academic achievement. Additionally, researchers collected student result sheets and surveyed college staff to gain a well-rounded perspective on the college climate. Data analysis using ANOVA and Scheffe tests identified significant effects. Major Findings of the study confirm that a positive organizational climate, regardless of college type, is associated with higher student academic achievement. Interestingly, students in government autonomous colleges achieved higher scores than those in non-government ones. The most significant finding, however, is the interaction effect. Students in government autonomous colleges with a strong learning environment achieved the highest scores, while those in non-government autonomous colleges with a weak environment achieved the lowest.

In 2012, the Vietnamese government enacted the institutional autonomy policy to support the reform process of the higher education system. The autonomy policy signifies the transfer of decision-making authority from ministries to public universities to increase university performance and competitiveness in the globalized knowledge economy. This paper examines the nature of autonomy as a new form of governance in Vietnamese higher education through the lens of agency theory. I used thematic analysis to analyze policy documents released by the Vietnamese government between 1993 and 2021. The findings indicate autonomy means Vietnamese public universities have authority to make decisions on primary activities; yet they must be accountable for their decision-making and responsible for funding sources. The study contributes to the literature on comparative and international higher education by providing a better understanding of autonomy in a post-Soviet context and informing a transformative approach to policy practices for the higher education reform.

The construction of an organization aims to enhance the performance and versatility of the organization for society. Consequently, as a platform for training human resources, universities have to develop constantly, following the community's insistence. In 2022, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology specified there are 21 state universities with legal entities. The status of a state university with a legal entity presents extensive autonomy in the field of academic, asset, and financial management. Besides, the universities also carry an obligation for university management to develop their institution, which is in accordance with Formal Model of Educational Management by Bush (2011). This model implies that organizations have a hierarchical structure and that predefined goals are pursued using a reasonable way. This study aims to identify the dominant variables for the state university with legal entity development. The method that used in this study is literature review by Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart (2003) with a case analysis involving a number of universities. The analysis results found that the dominant variables in the universities' development included the organization structure, working mechanism or organizational guidelines, the organizational climate and culture, along with the use of technology devices.

Corporate norms and values, characterised by an enterprise ethos, became the new parameters that defined the academic environment. Academics are increasingly becoming concerned about the commodification of higher education and its impact on academic quality and the standards of quality graduates. The voices of South African academics and their experiences within the neoliberal university governance remain underexplored in the current literature. This study aimed to enhance understanding and contribute to knowledge by exploring lecturers' experiences within a corporatised academic work environment. This study took place across public and private higher education institutions in South Africa. A cross-sectional, qualitative, interpretative phenomenological research design was employed. Data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of 20 lecturers. The data analysis followed the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis. The findings of the study identified three key areas that triggered feelings of frustration with management: (1) participants experienced a lack of management's understanding of governing academic work environments, (2) an erosion of their collegial culture, and (3) a lack of transparent communication. Contribution: A key contribution of this study, which set it apart from other studies, was lecturers' perceptions that their professional identity, collegiality, autonomy, and academic freedom were in crisis.

The articulation of school autonomy into practice nationally, regionally and locally is highly situated in terms of what it enables or impedes with regard to the professional autonomy of principals and teachers. Principal autonomy does not necessarily mean greater teacher professional autonomy. In this paper, we draw on a three-year qualitative study investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform in Australia. We present interview data from a case study of a large secondary college to present two conflicting stories of autonomy. Supported by a managerial restructure reflecting distributed leadership, we juxtapose the positive account of autonomy expressed by the leadership team with the negative one expressed by teachers. We explore the justice implications of this disjuncture and argue the importance of critically examining the complex ways in which the intentions and enactments of distributed leadership can be differently articulated and understood within the context of school autonomy reform.

Third Mission (TM) drives universities to a purpose beyond their traditional role, especially in local socioeconomic and innovation ecosystems. To investigate the issue, we consider an exploratory and comparative study of two different governance systems of public universities (Southeast Brazil-region 1 and Texas-US-region 2). The comparison took into account data from international universities' rankings performance to address TM and the structure of financial sources to address financial decentralization. The available evidence seems to suggest a positive association between the level of financial decentralization and the capability of the system of HE to deliver TM outputs. Universities under decentralized governance structures, which permit more autonomy to manage their resources, presented better results in most selected TM indicators. These findings reinforce the general belief that the governance arrangements that allow exploring synergies within local business ecosystems are more appropriate for ensuring organizational changes in the direction of entrepreneurial action.

In its pursuit of global university rankings, Indonesia introduced a series of higher education policies, one in 2014 to grant autonomy to a select group of universities, and another in 2017 to tie financial and promotional incentives to scientific publications for all researchers. To examine scientific productivity surrounding these policies, we use bibliometric data from Scopus spanning three decades from 1990 to 2020. We investigate the patterns of publication and collaboration and analyze them across journal quartiles, academic fields, and researcher cohorts. Our findings reveal that publications increased dramatically for both autonomous and non-autonomous higher education institutions after 2014. Single-university authorship was common practice and skewed publication quality towards Q3 and Q4 journals, while co-authorships with foreign organizations pulled the shift towards Q1 journals consistently across all fields. New researchers starting in 2014 published fewer Q1 and more Q3 and Q4 publications than the earlier cohort. We highlight policy implications on the need for a balance between publication quantity and quality and call on Indonesian policymakers to introduce holistic higher education reforms rather than introducing reforms that focus on the performance of the university for ranking purposes.

Federal and highly decentralized political systems open different spaces to interpret, adapt, and enact international policy trends and ideas within the same territory. Spain, a country with a highly decentralized educational system and contentious territorial politics, is a very suitable case to analyze these dynamics. Spain and its different regions have not been immune to the influence of global policy ideas that gear around promoting private provision, school choice, and New Public Management (NPM) in education. However, the consolidation of the decentralization project, together with the fact that many regional governments have aimed to construct, for a variety of reasons, singular political profiles, have resulted in markedly different policy trajectories. To show this, this article pays particular attention to recent changes in the educational governance arrangements of two important Spanish regions, Madrid and Catalonia, as they have gone through differentiated processes of educational reform. Albeit the two regional education systems share important features (such as a historical and wide-scale public-private partnership for school provision), they have engaged with, combined, and mobilized exogenous and endogenous privatization policy ideas in remarkably different ways. The article delves into the political drivers behind this policy differentiation process by paying special attention to the relations of coordination, conflict, and competition that prevail within an incomplete federal system, such as the Spanish one.

The New Education Policy (NEP), 2020, adopted by Government of India, envisages significant and far-reaching reforms in higher education sector in India. In this article, I foreground certain peculiar features of the process of massification of higher education in India, including privatisation and fragmentation. I locate the political economy of higher education in India in tensions inherent in centre-state relations and the pressure to respond to popular aspirations on the one hand and maintain standards on the other. The NEP, 2020 does not appear to acknowledge these historical processes. Instead, they appear to rely on a corporate model of BoG-driven governance of higher education institutions to drive the envisaged changes.

The widespread adoption of school autonomy with accountability reforms in education has generated debate regarding the relationship between autonomy, innovation and accountability. While at the policy design level, these three elements are highly related, several authors highlight the contradictions among them. By analyzing key documents and interviews, this paper aims to identify the program ontology behind the current Italian National Evaluation System (SNV), with a focus on the way in which autonomy, accountability and innovation have been conceptualized and linked together. The paper also aims to explore whether pitfalls and/or tensions exist that might hamper the achievement of the SNV goals. The findings highlight the peculiarities of the Italian autonomy with accountability system, which has resulted from the involvement of different stakeholders in the design and implementation of the reforms. The findings also reveal contradictions regarding some of its premises. Various rationales (improvement, efficiency, equity and transparency) emerge that seem to have acted as drivers of the reforms, however, the influence of globalizing discourses on international competition and the benefits of datafication also appears significant. A number of contextual aspects are finally considered which hamper the expected change mechanisms, highlighting the discontinuous ground in which such policy "dispositifs" operate.

Background: The higher education institutions will achieve autonomy traversing the path of graded accreditation. The autonomy of higher education is linked with the quality of education and accreditation. Higher education institutions will not only achieve autonomy but will sustain it in ever-changing external and internal environments. Purpose: The purpose is to design strategies for the sustenance of autonomy in higher education institutions. Method: The paper is based on an exploratory qualitative study conducted during 2020. The research objectives emanate from the review of the literature and the experiences of the researcher. The research objective is further explored from the literature review to formulate the research questions. The population for the study constitutes the autonomous higher education institutions of the country including engineering, management, pharmacy, and polytechnic institutions. The researcher selected a purposive sample to gather the information and views of the respondents. Respondents were selected from all over India, all types of institutions, and all levels of the institute. The researcher designed a comprehensive, concise, precise, and accurate structured and semistructured research instrument based on the literature, experiences, and focus group discussion. This research instrument was validated on content and construct in a group of six persons working in the area of autonomy. Then it was prepared in the Google form which was validated by forty respondents. The respondents are principals, heads of departments, senior faculty members working in national-level institutes, higher education institutes, and technical institutions. The instrument was mailed to more than 8000 respondents out of which 954 respondents provided information. The information is provided by principals, deans, heads of departments, and senior faculty members. Secondary information is also used to fill up the gap to achieve the research objective. The information received from structured instruments is compiled using Microsoft Excel Sheet to calculate the weighted mean and percentage. Results: The strategies for sustaining autonomy at central government, state government, regulatory body, institute, teacher, and student levels are evolved. Conclusion: To reap the full potential of autonomy and its sustenance strategies at different levels of hierarchy need to be effectively implemented on continuous basis.

Purpose: This study reviews the latest revisions to "Implementation Regulations of the Private Education Promotion Law of the People's Republic of China." In doing so, this study provides a comprehensive overview of the policy and its history, as well as the future outlook of private education in China. Design/Approach/Methods: Data were collected from the official website of the Ministry of Education of China as well as the media. Findings: This study identifies the background, rationale, major breakthroughs, and impacts of the revised policy. Originality/Value: This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the latest revisions to "Implementation Regulations of the Private Education Promotion Law of the People's Republic of China." In addition to an academic interpretation of these policy changes, it suggests how private education in China may develop.

This paper is to analyze the 2007 reform of the higher education system in Portugal (RJIES), which ambitioned fundamental changes in the governance of universities, the option given to higher education institutions (HEIs) to be transformed into public foundations being only one element of the reform. Based on desk research, the key elements of the reform, the process of designing and introducing it and an assessment of its impact are presented. We may conclude that the governance reform has led to more effective management of universities regardless of their legal status, but the new, foundation form has not fulfilled the expectations regarding the more autonomous and flexible operation of the transformed HEIs, due, to a large extent, to the financial restrictions brought about by the global crisis.

Several European countries have made it possible for public universities to become foundation universities. The transformation has also involved a change in their governance model with external actors taking important decision-making positions. We believe that these changes also imply a transformation of the organisational culture of the said universities. This study examines the transformation of a Finnish and a Hungarian university into a foundation one based on documents, interviews and questionnaire surveys. We found that for both universities there is strong pressure to move towards a corporate culture, but that change is not happening without resistance at either university.

In this paper we explore the concept of the middle tier in education systems, outlining how it is a crucial element that links high-level education policy to the practices that are carried out in schools. Reflecting on the similarities and differences in the profiles of the middle tiers of the four nations of the United Kingdom (UK), we observe how they are part of a complex educational ecosystem. While noting that there are variations in the profiles of the middle tiers we also highlight how they share some common functions that are key to mediating the way that policy links with schools. Using a four nations comparative approach to analyse the middle tier allows us a more nuanced understanding of how education policy works in general, but also how policy works in each particular national context.

Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) has become increasingly prominent in the public sector and in educational organizations. A policy for educational management based on EO has dimensions related to innovation, proactiveness, and risk-taking, which are preceded by organizational characteristics such as management support, discretion/autonomy, rewards/recognition, organizational boundaries, and time availability. The objective of this study is to analyze the organizational characteristics that influence EO in Municipal Centers for Early Childhood Education ("Centros Municipais de Educação Infantil--CEMEIs") in Brazil. The study was conducted in a town in the state of Minas Gerais and involved 15 CEMEIs, applying questionnaires to education professionals as coordinators, monitors, and teachers, whose data were processed using descriptive statistics and a structural equation model. The results present a construct for validating organizational characteristics that can influence EO in public early childhood education organizations. However, autonomy and management support were the determinants of EO in the organizations studied. Finally, there are implications and considerations for policies and strategies in public educational organizations, indicating EO as a way to deal with contingencies, resource scarcity, the stimulation of (intra)entrepreneurial culture and even potential early childhood education for entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this article was to critically explore the experiences and lessons of governance in higher education systems in the Commonwealth of Asia, and most importantly how these experiences and good practices can be applied to the governance and management of higher education in Commonwealth nations, especially in the Commonwealth of Africa. In order to address the purpose of this research study, systematic secondary research was conducted through a keyword search strategy. Using the gathered data, discussions were made on the various governance and management aspects in three Commonwealth Asian countries namely Malaysia, Singapore, and India in aspects and issues such as university autonomy, quality assurance, university-based research development, funding, institutional differentiation, and governance reforms proved salient for discussion. It is important to note that this article is not attempting to address higher education across geopolitical contexts by comparing governance practices between Commonwealth Africa and Commonwealth Asia; instead, it aims to share good practices for the common good and to generate a contextual application of higher education governance practices between the Commonwealth of Asia and the Commonwealth of Africa.

This article examines the concept of academic autonomy within the "Yugoslav model" of higher education as a peripheral system characterised by an eclectic mix of elements from different systems, resulting in mutations with unique features during its development. The hitherto under-researched history of this higher education model has by no means been uniform or linear; because of this complexity, the focus here is limited to the case of Slovenia but considers the broader context. The focus is on the understanding, legislation, and (non-)implementation of academic autonomy as articulated between 1945 and 1991. The concept was inherited: it was never used in the legislation of federal socialist Yugoslavia yet was used in political and public debates. Our analysis relates these debates to the rapidly changing legislation and the broader socio-political context. Although the "Yugoslav model" has vanished, its traces and ashes, including old contradictions and dilemmas, remain partly present in the higher education systems of independent states that emerged on the territory of the former federation. The principle that knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the present and approaching the future is confirmed in this case as well.

Privatisation and commercialisation in education encompass a range of interrelated practices, including the outsourcing of educational services as well as increased reliance on commercially produced resources for the delivery of learning and assessment. An increase in these practices has accompanied the shift from centralised systemic management of schools and specific programs like English as an Additional Language/ Dialect (EAL/D), to school autonomy whereby principals control budget expenditure decisions, ostensibly in response to the needs of their school population. The intersection between school autonomy, commercialisation and delivery of the specialised service of EAL/D is the focus of this paper. This paper presents the findings of a survey with EAL/D teachers in Australia, in relation to the extent to which they are experiencing commercialisation and the impact this is having on the delivery of a longstanding service designed to ensure equity of outcomes for English language learners. The data suggests that the use of commercial products in schools may not be aligned with appropriate educational practices which target language learning needs. There is a strong need for further research in the uptake and use of commercial products for specialist language support. This will elucidate the extent to which EAL/D as a specialisation is being impacted by the use of commercial products both in the appropriacy of the products and in the deprofessionalisation of specialist EAL/D teachers.

When the higher education policies and practices of various countries in the world are examined, it is seen that higher education systems are open to innovations and improvements in order to meet the changing and developing needs of society. However, the problems experienced by higher education institutions in Turkey significantly limit both the solution of social problems and the provision of social development. From this point of view, this study aims to comprehensively address the existing problems that prevent higher education institutions from reaching the desired level in Turkey. In the current study, the main problematic areas in higher education in Turkey were determined by document analysis technique. In this context, the study deals with the problems of supply, demand, and imbalance in higher education; the problem of faculty members; autonomy and accountability; and internationalization in higher education are discussed. The results of the study show that higher education in Turkey is insufficient in many aspects to deal with the problems experienced. The study draws attention to some points that need to be addressed in the struggle with the problems experienced in higher education and ends with some regulation suggestions.

Since the implementation of the Excellence Initiative and the Excellence Strategy, German higher education institutions have been restructuring university governance, especially those selected as Universities of Excellence. This study uses a holistic and mission-related integrated governance approach to conduct a qualitative analysis of the governance transformation of German Universities of Excellence, aiming to provoke discussion on transforming governance to optimize organizational effectiveness and sustainable development of German higher education institutions. Transforming governance of German Universities of Excellence involves mission statements, strategic goals, institutional strategies, research, teaching, the third mission, internationalization, global engagement, governance relationships and structures, institutional leadership, funding, autonomy, innovation, digital transformation, quality assurance, and sustainable development, aiming to enhance accountability, performativity, transparency, openness and organizational effectiveness with efficient administrative management in alignment with institutional missions, vision, core values, and strategic goals.

This study focuses on the debate surrounding global policies and practices related to the sector of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), utilizing the Greek policy context as an example. Drawing on the critical education policy studies literature, this paper interrogates the complex concepts of quality and autonomy, which are core in the global agenda. We do this by exploring how the international and national austerity measures, imposed in many countries -- and especially in Greece, marked by a devastating economic crisis in the last decade -- have affected their re-interpretation and translation. Our empirical data suggest that municipal ECEC directors, interviewed in the context of our research, hold diverse views on quality, raising issues of inequality, limited participation and low attainment. The study generates reflections, suggesting that the idea of autonomy has been systematically associated with Greece's economic struggles and therefore understood and re-interpreted by the participants in a constrained way that limits their action. The way these notions are re-contextualized at the municipal level, and the consequences for ECEC provision, pose as key issues of this research.

School autonomy with accountability (SAWA) reforms have developed in diverse forms in Northern Europe. Following processes of decentralization to the municipal and school levels, quality assurance and inspection became key to the test-based accountability agendas of Denmark and England respectively. With an abductive approach, we explore the epistemological potential of a hybrid theoretical framework, which combines assemblage theory with critical realism, to analyze the production stories of these two policy instruments. Drawing on data from an international comparative research project, and more recent policy document analyses, we examine the arrangement of social entities -- discourses, instruments, technologies, artefacts, and actors -- that led to particular accountability outcomes within these specific educational assemblages. We argue that, despite distinctions in their social entities, the dominant state assemblages of accountability in Denmark and England have been captured by the global SAWA and capitalist assemblages at distinct times. Although school actors are incorporated into, and antagonistic towards, the state assemblages, change is limited due to the resilience of the underlying logic of epistemic governance and the desire to improve educational standards for a global knowledge economy. We conclude briefly with an assessment of the utility of the hybrid framework to the comparison of SAWA.

The study examines the selective adoption of the school-autonomy-with-accountability (SAWA) reform at upper secondary school level in Iceland. It draws on a review of policy documents (acts, amendments to acts, regulations) and interviews with 17 individuals, including four former ministers of education that served over the period 1995-2017. The authors identify three distinct reform waves: a general public management reform (NPM) implemented across all sectors (1991-1995), the school autonomy reform (1995-2009), and the school-autonomy-with-soft-accountability reform (2009-2015). The sequence explains why opening up to the private sector during NPM required all line ministries to come up with clearly defined tasks and expected outcomes and why the third wave was an attempt to (minimally) reregulate the sector. The proliferation of standardized testing, a feature of SAWA in many other countries, did not occur in Iceland. Strikingly, the argument for autonomy was from the onset linked to diversity, that is, enabling upper secondary schools to respond to students' diverse needs and interests and thereby reduce student drop. The study attempts to demonstrate the importance of the temporal dimension of policy transfer such as, for example, the timing, tempo, sequence and duration of adopted policies.

Spreading like wildfire, school autonomy with accountability (SAWA) policies have transformed education worldwide. Rooted in new public management, SAWA is a 'policy bundle' that links greater decision-making at the school level with standardization and monitoring practices like large-scale assessments and performance indicators. As with every traveling reform, SAWA varies among countries influenced by prior policies, the government's ideology, and stakeholders' interests. However, studies often focus on individual elements of the SAWA bundle rather than the complete package. Thus, this paper addresses this gap by analyzing SAWA in Colombia, examining how policy paradigms and institutional legacies have shaped its trajectory -- from its adoption to the present. Data combines policy document analysis and interviews with key informants (n = 48). The study shows the 1991-1994 reform period as a critical juncture in Colombia, consolidating a decentralized governance system dominated by a democratic educational paradigm. However, a counter-reform in 2001 produced significant effects under an opposing sign. Eager to recentralize educational political and administrative control, Colombia's national elites incrementally deployed large-scale assessments, learning standards, and system-wide performance monitoring policies configuring a 'quality assurance' SAWA model. While market-like policies incentivizing competition and high-stakes were rapidly abandoned, SAWA policies represent a managerial turn in Colombia's education.

The term tertiary education has gained prominence in recent policy debates in the UK [Morgan (2023). "Labour 'would review whole landscape' of tertiary education." "Times Higher Education," 28 November. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/labour-would-review-whole-landscape-tertiary-education]. This paper presents findings from a review of the use of the term in academic and policy papers in the UK over the last 80 years. The analysis reveals the role of international organisations in defining this term initially as a synonym for post-compulsory education before using it as a statistical measure which became a normative guide for many member states. More recently, the term tertiary education has been used as a descriptor of systems of educational governance and by the World Bank for specific systems of organisation. Using these definitions as a guide, the review demonstrates differences in government policy in the four nations of the United Kingdom: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Here there is evidence of periodic and partial policy change, but little sustained full engagement with this agenda. The review suggests that if future tertiary education policy initiatives are introduced they should cover all potential learners once they have left the compulsory phase of education and should be advanced by regional bodies with involvement from learners, employers and community representatives allocating funds from a single tertiary education budget.

This study examines multilevel factors shaping Indonesian student performances attending non-"madrasah/sekolah" and madrasah schools. Using multistratified sample design and grouped based on their school system, data from 30 schools, 64 teachers, and 1,319 students were analysed. Focusing on student, teacher, and school-level variables, hierarchical linear modelling revealed that reading difficulties and anxiety, along with school climates emphasizing achievement pressure and discipline, significantly influenced reading outcomes in both groups. Students grappling with heightened learning complexities and anxiety faced the greatest challenges. Interestingly, madrasah students thrived within competitive environments emphasizing high achievement pressure and minimal disciplinary constraints, while sekolah students who excelled in settings that valued discipline over relentless achievement pressure performed better. Unique influences emerged: peer relationships and anxiety directly affected reading scores in sekolah, while gender was the sole predictor in madrasah. Interaction effects among these multilevel factors in shaping student reading achievement across diverse educational settings were revealed.

School systems are shifting towards forms of post-bureaucratic governance (PBG), implying higher levels of school autonomy, choice, and performance-based management. Under this governance approach, which combines forms of administrative and market accountability, schools face greater levels of competition and external pressure to perform. Schools experience such pressures unevenly and address them through different responses. The paper develops a mixed-methods case study conducted in Madrid, a Spanish region where PBG reform has intensified in the last decades, and proposes a novel index to position schools within their reference local education markets. The results show that schools articulate a broad range of logics of action, largely interrelated with their position in the education marketplace. We also show that schools' responses to external pressures are dynamic and marked by tensions of a different nature, which schools need to navigate, often without sufficient support from public authorities.

In the recent literature on the regulation of private schools by the state, Tooley argues that the state should refrain from such a practice. The important reasons for this view are that the state regulations are impractical and do not foster an entrepreneurship attitude. He prefers the implementation of a self-regulating mechanism for the private schools. We find that Tooley's argument of private institutions functioning without state intervention, in the Indian context of primary education, is inappropriate. The reasons are: (i) the state has a duty to provide education and this cannot be done without state's intervention. (ii) If the end-users in the market themselves demand state intervention, then Tooley has to accept it as it is the demand from the market and in the Indian context, the parents do demand state interventions and (iii) there is an incompatible interest between the private and state institutions on education and hence require state's intervention. On these grounds, we argue that in India the state needs to regulate the private schools, especially for primary education. In the absence of such regulations, these private schools may focus on maximising their interest rather than ensuring justice in education.

It is unlawful under the "Disability Discrimination Act 1992" (Cth) for Australian schools to discriminate against students based on disability. Yet discrimination against students with disability is on the increase in Australian schools, and so is the decentralisation and autonomy of schools. This scoping review set out to determine what evidence exists of an association between school autonomy and discrimination against students with disability, primarily in Australia but with an additional examination of studies conducted in England. It further examined the type of research methods that have been used to investigate this topic. Included studies did not provide direct evidence of a causal association between school autonomy and discrimination against students with disability; however, the findings uncovered worrisome trends suggesting that an association may exist. Examination of the included studies' research methods suggests that a more fit-for-purpose methodology is required to determine the association between school autonomy and discrimination against students with disability in primary and secondary education settings.

This paper offers a historical analysis of organizational identity development at a particular Dutch university, the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. Our analysis contributes to the discussion on what factors contribute to organizational identity maintenance and evolution. Whereas the literature suggests a rather straightforward development, with national and institutional governance arrangements offering more institutional autonomy and providing significant scope for identity development and profiling, this case study shows that these relationships between identity, governance, and autonomy are not that obvious. In this particular case, the opposite happened. Despite more autonomy, VU Amsterdam was not able to maintain its historically distinctive identity, nor was it able to replace this with a new, unambiguous identity. External factors (demographics) and internal dynamics (leadership strategies) explain the anomalies.

During the pandemic, a number of states instituted hold-harmless funding policies to protect school district financially from declining enrollments. In addition, some school choice policies have protected traditional public schools financially from declining enrollments. Together, these policies raise the question of whether competitive effects can exist in a policy environment of reduced financial pressure. Theoretically, despite the lack of financial pressure, schools could feel competitive pressure in other ways including a loss of reputation as students move to schools of choice. To provide insights on whether schools can improve without the threat of financial loss, we examine the Seoul school choice program which introduced autonomous private high schools (APHSs) in the context in which there is equalized funding across schools. More specifically, we examine whether competition induced by APHSs affects the achievement of students attending traditional public and private schools. The effect of APHSs is identified by exploiting plausible exogenous APHSs' entry through the random assignment of students. We find a small and positive effect of APHS penetration on the Korean and English achievement of private school students while finding no effects for traditional public schools, which have limited ability to respond.

Agreements between national public authorities and higher education institutions serve as a governance instrument in many European countries. In Norway, these agreements are currently undergoing change, as the state now invites the institutions to propose their own goals and parameters in the agreements. This study seeks to understand the negotiation process for new agreements and assess how higher education institutions expect the new agreements may affect their institutional autonomy in practice. The methodology includes analysing negotiation documents and interviews with key institutional officials to understand their expectations of the new agreements. The findings indicate that Norwegian higher education institutions have enjoyed both substantive and procedural autonomy during the negotiation process. However, it is anticipated that the new agreements will have a limited impact on institutional autonomy in practice, except for their role in legitimising internal strategic priorities. As a result, this study raises concerns and contributes to a deeper understanding of how agreements between public authorities and higher education institutions serve as instruments for governing higher education.

The trend towards seeing education as a commodity and part of a global industry has transformed the field of education. We argue that these transformations are reducing the autonomy of the field of education as it has incorporated business rhetoric, logic and practice. We examine this through an analysis of discursive formations manifested in two major international edu-business events in Finland -- "Dare to Learn" and "XcitED." The performativity existing in these events, combining actions and interactions, objective and subjective elements and materialized and symbolic interests and outcomes, enables convergences between business and education. In Finland, where education is overwhelmingly public, there is a subtle marketization, increasingly integrating business rationales and attitudes in education. We employed event ethnography and discourse analysis to examine points of diffraction between education and business. A transversal movement between the field of education and the field of business is enabled by symbolic power. "Dare to Learn" and "XcitED" discursive formations reveal the penetration of business in education, which reframes the field of education and fosters the global education industry in Finland and abroad, challenging notions and practices of democracy and citizenship in education.

Referring to failures in policy-driven public governance research this paper looks at strategising in higher education. It expands horizons for understanding university strategies in a more nuanced way than hitherto has been done. Deploying systems theory, it shows how different temporalities co-exist in strategies and how their change reflects the university's capacity to meet future contingencies. Extending the current research on strategising, the paper uses the present's past, the present's future, the future's present and the future's future as temporal categories to understand strategies. It shows how strategies evolve from traditional linear planning orientation to a novel potentiality-seeking mode with unique meanings attached to unknown futures. It claims that universities develop such responsive contingency awareness to construct a leeway for their self-governance in the face of unexpected future conditions. This change is characterised by the emergence of a potentialising organisation seeking to turn indeterminant futures into its developmental resources.

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic feature of the conditions made possible by these reforms, namely 'depoliticisation', 'corporatisation', 'endogenous privatisation', and 'disintermediation'. In response international organisations and national governments have called for improved accountability amid fears of corruption and governance failure. In this paper, we take a fresh look at the existing literature on school autonomy through a unique focus on risk as a rationality of government. Specifically, we adopt a governmentality perspective of school autonomy reforms in England and Australia to capture the significance of risk to recalibrations of education governance.

Through an analysis of Allahabad University's functioning, this article argues that independent India's ideas of federalism reimagined university education. New visions of the educated person - linked to ideas about the ideal citizen - changed the kinds of disciplines and universities being funded. With support from industrial elites to buttress the new nation-state's development plans, the state prioritised technical education over arts and humanities to serve a unified economic policy. This change manifested through increased scrutiny over university functioning and crackdowns on student protests. The Indian postcolonial state's "centralised" federalism to manage the national economy and promote national integration impacted university funding. Ultimately, decisions about university funding were tied to the state's vision of the ideal apolitical citizen student, who would contribute to national development. This article highlights the complicated relationship between capital, the postcolonial nation-state, and university autonomy.

Drawing on evidence from documents and semi-structured interviews with members of the Catalan system of higher education, this research explores how intermediary organizations (IOs) facilitate the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), conceived as a global policy framework, in local contexts. We observed that, despite the voluntary nature of SDGs-related policies, most Catalan public universities embraced the SDGs. Two contextual factors likely facilitated their effective engagement with this global initiative: first, the autonomy granted by regional and national governments to the higher education sector when it comes to social responsibility, and, second, the willingness and ability of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Catalonia to work with the SDGs. The key element added to these contextual factors was the collaboration stimulated by meso-level actors, namely Catalan intermediaries. The Catalan case exhibits a process whereby IOs effectively engage with HEIs, forging a platform for collaboration; in turn, this led the local government to delegate the task of promoting the SDGs to IOs. This paper contributes to the debate in global higher education policy-making as it discusses the policy implications of the involvement of intermediary actors in bringing global policy frameworks to local level.

Abundant research has shown the influence of social background on university dropout. However, there is little research that considers the different progression options for analysing the structure of the decisions that students make. This article explores the possible alternative decisions of: (1) continuing the initial degree course chosen; (2) persisting but transferring to other degrees or institutions; (3) dropping out of university. To this effect, we seek whether the decision structure follows a compensatory advantage pattern, according to which poor performance during the first year at university unequally affects students from low and high social backgrounds. The latter compensates for poor results by using alternative strategies to minimise the negative consequences. We analyse longitudinal data from a cohort of students entering any on-site university in the Catalan system in 2012-13 (n = 36909). The results show the importance of performance in predicting university progression decisions. No differences by social origin are perceived in the decisions to continue the same course of study, while differences are observed in dropout and transfer decisions which, for their part, follow a compensatory advantage structure. The results show the need to consider the interaction between performance and social background, and to broaden our view of students' trajectories.

This study applies resource dependence theory to address the question of how the critical resource dependence relationship emerges in the context of a university's performance agreement. This study focuses on two Nordic universities that have adopted performance agreements while simultaneously using strong performance-based state funding. Resource dependence involves an asymmetry and power imbalance that leads an organisation to believe that it is dependent on a more powerful organisation that has resources under its control. The theory reveals the central role of performance agreements and their associated instruments in the universities' relationship with the ministry and within universities. We found minor differences in Nordic university examples indicating the influence of the performance regimes within the management arena and within the material dimensions of university autonomy. Performance agreements and their related instruments are isolated from the other key realities of universities. Understanding the loose coupling between the agreements and the characteristics of universities are needed to enhance universities' ability to pursue their unique mission in society. Resource dependence theory provides a valuable framework for analysing the dynamics and dependencies that exist between organisations and within loosely coupled organisations, shedding light on the interactions and influences that shape these relationships.

In education systems around the globe influenced by neoliberalism, teachers commonly experience reforms which emphasise local responsibility and accountability. Teachers additionally work within what has been described as an era of social acceleration and associated "fast policy", with a perceived increase in the pace of reform. In this article, we present data drawn from a large (N = 18,234) survey of Australian public-school teachers' work. Analysis of both quantitative and qualitative reports indicates a widespread teacher perception of workload increase from 2013 to 2017, and the attribution of such increase to the introduction of policy initiatives including, but not limited to, school autonomy reform. Our findings have implications for education policy in Australia and beyond, with an erosion of teacher trust suggesting the need for more sustainable and consultative forms of "slow democracy" in education policy.

The series of responses in this article were gathered as part of an online mini conference held in September 2021 that sought to explore different ideas and articulations of school autonomy reform across the world (Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, the USA, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand). It centred upon an important question: what needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education? There was consensus across the group that school autonomy reform creates further inequities at school and system levels when driven by the logics of marketisation, competition, economic efficiency and public accountability. Against the backdrop of these themes, the conference generated discussion and debate where provocations and points of agreement and disagreement about issues of social justice and the mobilisation of school autonomy reform were raised. As an important output of this discussion, we asked participants to write a short response to the guiding conference question. The following are these responses which range from philosophical considerations, systems and governance perspectives, national particularities and teacher and principal perspectives.

The approaches to governance employed by various societies have become increasingly similar, following a pattern of reforms that move away from the control mode to the supervisory mode. To this end, direct central involvement is being replaced by a model that relies on more sophisticated forms of funding, monitoring, and performance review. This case study research adopts in-depth semi-structured interviews with 31 top- and mid-level administrators and academics at two premier universities and senior members of the ministry and its affiliated organizations. Through the lens of agency theory, it explores stakeholders' perceptions of university-government relations and how the government maintains its support, control and influence through a system of checks and balances. The findings reveal a salient role of the government as a policy driver. In addition, the coalitions of universities, the state, and society have exerted a significant impact on policy development and implementation in Taiwan. Empirically, this study has illustrated how a cultural force hidden in agency theory influences higher education governance in Taiwan. Thus, it sets an implication and further theorizes an application of this widely-used and western-based framework to understand the state-university relationship in East Asia.

When the Carnegie Foundation was established in 1905, universities in Canada and Newfoundland were eligible for grants, on strict conditions that were seen by some as "colonial," "continentalist," or "imperial" intrusions on autonomy; for example, a Carnegie plan to create a federation of Maritime universities. This is a study of how Canadian universities found ways to comply with the requirement, of the compromises they had to make, or chose not to make, in governance, and of an ultimate shift in balance from sectarian to secular, and independent to publicly supported.