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Considerable efforts have been made to better understand how global trends toward standards-based reforms have emerged in national education systems. Less well known, however, is the unfolding of standards-based reforms within and across federal education systems. In federal systems, national governments do not make policy unilaterally, but rather share authority with multiple orders of government. Using the concept of "global forms" to explore the pervasiveness of standards-based assessments across four diverse federations (Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States), this article aims to illuminate the roles that subnational governments play in the assemblage of standards-based education reforms. We argue that three key roles played by subnational governments are apparent in each: (1) semiautonomous laboratories of innovation, (2) coproducers of policy, and (3) venues for nongovernment actors. Our work suggests that greater attention must be paid to subnational spaces to better understand the manifestation, development, and expansion of global policy trends affecting education.

Finland has, as of late, become an inspiration for American school reform. There is no denying that we have much to learn from the Finnish system and it rightly deserves its global accolades. However, over the course of the following pages, I would like to suggest that it is also lucrative to look north of the 49th parallel and consider the practices at work in Canada. Finland has a number of advantages that America lacks, and conditions in Canada are far closer to the challenges faced by American educators. Despite these certain disadvantages, Canada has nevertheless consistently scored near the top of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment tests and comes extremely close to achieving educational equality. Perhaps even most astonishing is the fact that these results have also been achieved by provinces acting on their own, free from the direct intervention of the federal government based in Ottawa. I argue that the roots of these successes lie in the configuration and organization of schooling practices across the country that, when combined with the "indirect" support of the federal government, have enabled the creation of a pan-Canadian system of elementary and secondary education. (Contains 1 figure and 4 footnotes.)

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure--legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them. This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion. KEY WORDS: policy failure, legitimacy, policy incubation, emotive appeals, stakeholder engagement, Public policy scholars have long contemplated the meaning and sources of policy failure. Studies of failure often investigate cases where policies do not achieve their stated objectives or are unable [...]