Current educational planning systems have often failed or been irrelevant because they have been based on inaccurate assumptions about educational organizations. Traditional planning models assume educational organizations are goal-driven, follow rational and sequential processes, operate in predictable environments, and have effective internal…

Since 1988, the National Resource Center has conducted a national survey every three years to gather information about the nature and extent of first-year seminars on American college campuses. The findings from the 2006 survey administration have been reorganized to make it easier to find information of interest with major chapters focusing on…

These are exciting and challenging times for English language curriculum development for school-age learners. The global reach of English has spurred a rethinking of its role in education and, consequently, a rethinking of how to teach it. The accounts in this volume represent differences in educational systems, language teaching traditions,…

Formative assessment has recently become a focus of renewed research as state and federal policy-makers realize that summative assessments have reached a point of diminishing returns as a tool for increasing student achievement. Consequently, supporters of large-scale testing programs are now beginning to consider the potential of formative…

This volume is part of a series of monographs from Australia devoted to outlining an alternative approach, based on neo-Marxist concepts, to policy studies in education. The opening monograph is a critique of policies favoring transition programs aimed at training students to fit into the prevailing structure of the workplace, suggesting that such…

Offering a primer on action research methodologies and examples of practice, "Students in Transition: Research and Practice in Career Development" responds to a dual challenge facing career development educators--designing cutting-edge career development interventions and demonstrating their effectiveness. Overviews of quantitative and qualitative…

This collection of articles serves as a record of some of the deliberations of members of the Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions (ATID) (Jerusalem, Israel). The collection captures the collective thinking that the ATID fellows and faculty members underwent as they explored methods of transforming prayer in Jewish schools into a more…

This document contains three papers on ethics and integrity in human resource development (HRD). "Redefining Human Resource Development: An Integration of the Learning, Performance, and Spirituality of Work Perspectives" (Reid A. Bates, Tim Hatcher, Elwood F. Holton III, Neal Chalofsky) describes an effort to articulate the tensions…

When charter schools first arrived on the American educational scene, few observers suspected that within two decades thousands of these schools would be established, serving almost a million and a half children across forty states. The widespread popularity of these schools, and of the charter movement itself, speaks to the unique and chronic…

This long-awaited sequel to Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith's classic anthology "American Higher Education: A Documentary History" presents one hundred and seventy-two key edited documents that record the transformation of higher education over the past sixty years. The volume includes such seminal documents as Vannevar Bush's 1945…

These excerpts present some of the views of noted musician and music educator, Howard Hanson, on the purposes and goals of public school music education. (SJL)

The reports describe the institutional context, design, and administration of language awareness courses and course components in seven British secondary schools: the Oratory School in Reading, North Westminster Community School in London, the Priory School in Barnsley, Hambrough Middle School in Southall, the Henry Box School in Witney,…

With an annual yearly growth rate of 9.3 percent over the last two decades, Advanced Placement courses have become a juggernaut in American high school education. AP courses are routinely perceived as an indicator of educational rigor, and many schools push to enroll low-income or minority students in these courses in the hope of preparing them…

This monograph describes the theory and practice of the invitational learning model as it applies to school counseling and development. Invitational learning is a paradigm for personal and professional functioning, and for organizational restructuring, based on four values regarding the nature of people and their potential and the nature of…

Elaborates on explorations and arguments prompted by the effort undertaken by the Department of Education through the National Center for Education Statistics to begin developing the National Assessment of College Student Learning (NACSL), which focuses on, among other things, "advanced ability to communicate effectively," as specified…