Since the 1980s, the social and economic forces of globalisation have driven a wide array of new policy formations and processes in education. One powerful global trend has been the development of policies designed to achieve greater national standardisation in core areas of schooling, including curricula, teaching, and assessment (Hartong, 2014; Savage, 2016). Standards-based reforms have been strongly promoted by international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in response to concerns about the role of education in a global economy (OECD, 2004), in turn prompting governments to reconsider how education systems can be more efficiently harnessed in a context of intensifying global competition (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010).

In recent years, the standardisation of education policies and processes has been accompanied by a complex array of new accountability measures and data infrastructures, ostensibly to evaluate the progress that is being made (Lingard & Sellar, 2013; Morgan, 2016). A proliferation of international, national, and sub-national indicators, benchmarks and assessments, for example, are now regularly used to rank and compare education systems and schools (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013). The OECD, in particular, is playing a central role in generating a global set of policy ideas and practices through both its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and ‘Education at a Glance’ reports of education indicators (Lingard & Grek, 2007).

To date, existing research on the global transformation of education policy and governance has largely focused on identifying and comparing national trends and policy changes, in federal and unitary countries alike. At the same time, however, there has been a growing body of research that points to the ambiguity of global-local flows of ‘recontextualisation’ (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012), the local meaning of reforms, but also the changing influence of national and local actors who operate as policy ‘brokers’ (or opponents) for (or against) reform. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that sub-national actors are playing a powerful role as mediators in globalising and standardising tendencies in education and that in turn, global policy actors are increasingly active at 'scales' below the nation-state (Engel & Frizzell, 2015). This awareness for (sub)national dynamics is particularly conspicuous in multi-level federal systems, in which schooling policies are not controlled by a central government and about which ‘national level’ claims about global policy influence are highly problematic. Against this background, the proposed paper provides insights from four distinctive federal systems (Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States) to explore the following question: How are transnational education reform trends reshaping not only national, but also subnational policy processes in multi-level education systems?

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