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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.

Although policies aiming to increase school-based autonomy are commonplace, we know little about how school actors use autonomy to improve organizational performance in varied contexts. This paper surfaces perspectives from school leaders and teachers on the effectiveness of autonomy and describes how these perspectives vary across schools. We use contingency theory to guide our analysis of case study data from eight schools in the Denver Public Schools (DPS) district which vary in school governance, performance, and demographics. We interviewed school principals, teachers, teacher leaders and other charter and district administrators in the 2016–17 school year, totaling 53 participants. School cases consistently reported high levels of accountability pressure from the district central office to improve student test scores that, in turn, informed their mission and goal setting. Schools also reported different levels of autonomy that varied according to school governance model and consistently described these levels as optimal for achieving school goals. Several internal and external contingencies shaped these perceptions albeit in different ways depending on autonomy level. Relevant contingencies included task uncertainty in each school’s mission, teacher organizational fit, school leadership, support from intermediate entities, and procedures to coordinate decision-making across school actors or organizational sub-units.

Dieses Buch widmet sich den Widersprüchlichkeiten, Paradoxien und Dilemmata in Bildungspolitik, der Schule und den darin agierenden Verantwortlichen. Im Diskurs [...] werden Diskrepanzen aufgezeigt, die sich durch verschiedene Reformambitionen in Richtung Autonomisierung von Schulen nicht auflösen. Im Gegenteil: Sie treten konturierter denn je hervor. Autor*innen aus Österreich, Deutschland und Südtirol zeigen aus ihren Blickwinkeln Schwierigkeiten auf, die der Pädagogik an sich innewohnen; gleichzeitig werden die unterschiedlichsten Facetten des Lernens aller Beteiligten, von (Fort-)Bildungsbemühungen und Reformbewegungen beleuchtet. Ein Hauptaugenmerk liegt auf der Entstehungsgeschichte, den rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen und der Aktualität von Schulautonomie. (DIPF/Orig.).

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on the policy and practice contexts for school autonomy and twenty-first century learning in Canadian provinces. Design/methodology/approach This paper reports on an analysis of policies in Canadian provinces (particularly the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan). The authors review policies related to school autonomy and twenty-first century learning initiatives. Findings In this paper, the authors argue that autonomy is a complicated and multi-levelled phenomena with a measure of autonomy devolved from the state to local school divisions, and yet other elements of autonomy devolved to the school and to individual teachers. The link between autonomy and twenty-first century learning are unclear as yet. This paper attempts to establish the policy contexts for school autonomy and twenty-first century learning without making claims about a causal relation between the two. Originality/value The originality of this paper lies in its description of autonomy beyond the school level. Autonomy, as a construct, is rarely examined as a dynamic process among multiple layers of the educational system.

This paper provides an overview of the policies of school autonomy in Australian public education from the Karmel report in 1973 to the present day. The key focus is on the social justice implications of this reform. It tracks the tensions between policy moves to both grant schools greater autonomy and rein in this autonomy with the increasing instatement of external forms of regulation. Utilising Nancy Fraser's concepts of dis-embedding and re-embedding markets, we track key policy moments in three Australian states (Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales) along with federal interventions. We draw attention to the redistributive and representative justice implications arising from these policy moments as occurring within a consistent trajectory towards a market agenda and argue that future policy needs to consider the effect of past policy. [Author abstract]

Although scholars have proposed school climate as a key mediator through which school-based management (SBM) can improve educational outcomes, empirical evidence on the relationship between SBM and school climate improvement is sparse. In this article, we use three waves of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data across 57 countries to examine the association between SBM autonomy and different dimensions of school climate (academic, community, and safety). We find that greater school autonomy is associated with significant improvements in all dimensions of school climate, although the strongest improvements occur in safety. Our results show that these improvements primarily occur when schools are given greater autonomy over students (student assessment, admission, and discipline), whereas giving schools greater autonomy over teachers, budgets, or curricula is not associated with climate improvement. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that increased school autonomy is overall associated with improvement in all three dimensions of school climate in high-income countries but not in low- and middle-income countries. However, the positive association between autonomy over students and school climate is observed in both groups of countries. The results suggest that increased autonomy over students should be prioritized in the sequencing of SBM reforms.

This study analyzed the mechanism of school autonomy on principals' organizational commitment by applying self-determination theory. Participants were 223 Chinese principals from primary and secondary schools. The survey results revealed that (a) school autonomy, job satisfaction, self-efficacy, principal-teacher relationships, and organizational commitment were positively correlated with each other; (b) job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and principal-teacher relationships played multiple mediating roles between school autonomy and organizational commitment; and (c) the respective strength of the three mediation effects was not significantly different. The findings enrich knowledge of school principals' organizational commitment and imply a need to pay attention to the satisfaction of their psychological needs.

In many countries, education systems are moving towards a combination of increased school autonomy and intensified accountability. In the wake of that shift, decision-making at the school level has become paramount, and the role of the school leader has gained in importance. Despite these trends, surprisingly little is known about how schools and school leaders use school autonomy in practice. To study the use of school autonomy in practice internationally, and, subsequently, its impact on outcomes, a classification is needed to capture the full range of school interventions. An extensive literature review revealed that existing classifications are inadequate for these purposes. This article presents the mixed-methods construction and validation of an empirically based classification of school interventions that allows for the identification, analysis, and comparison of the actual use of school autonomy. To capture the range of school autonomy in practice, a school intervention was broadly defined as a planned action intended to cause change in the school. That definition was not confined to innovative interventions and did not rule out any school decision-making areas. An open-response questionnaire was employed for the same purpose. Because of the high level of school autonomy in the Dutch education system, the study was carried out among secondary-education school leaders in the Netherlands. School leaders with the ultimate process responsibility for their school were regarded as decision-making executives at the school level. To ensure the face and content validation of the classification, school-level decision-making representatives were actively involved at all stages of the process.

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 public education systems of many countries have undergone governance reforms involving administrative decentralisation, corporatisation and community 'empowerment'. In this paper, we examine the significance of local participation and partnerships in the context of public school autonomy and their corporatisation. Focusing specifically on the use of school boards in the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia, we analyse the interview responses of five IPS principals using Foucauldian notions of governmentality, governance and community. The analysis shows that school boards are conceptualised and mobilised through the narrow technical-rationalist discourses of governance associated with corporatised school autonomy. School boards function as a new form of governmentality that constrains recruitment and participation in school decision-making in ways that depoliticise education. In response to the rise of school autonomy and corporatisation in Australia and elsewhere, we argue for wider local participation on school boards and local engagement with, rather than eschewal of, the politics surrounding education and the public good. [Author abstract]