Abstract
This book is a collection of papers that study and discuss current education policy challenges from a variety of perspectives. Although the term is clearly too broad and needs some elaboration, these papers are part of the field, or genre of study, that is commonly referred to as ‘critical education policy studies’. Perhaps today the term ‘critical’ has become devoid of meaning – and there are probably no researchers who wouldn’t call themselves, or their research, critical. Notwithstanding this trivialisation, we do want to maintain the term ‘critical’ here. However, critical does not refer to how the researcher of education policy relates to her research (methodology, data, results, peers…). Indeed, in that sense, all research is expected to be critical. Neither is the term ‘critical’ used here to characterise the kind of analytical framework that informs the research usually thought of as ‘critical social or political theory’.