Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the internationalisation of nearly all spheres of society and the process of European integration will be leading to the development of a European vocational education and training VET architecture. Design/methodology/approach: The analysis of the "Copenhagen process" is based on…

Quality Counts 2010 is the 14th edition of "Education Week's" annual report card on American public education as viewed through the lens of the states' education policies and outcomes. As in the past, this year's edition is built on twin foundations: (1) the detailed data collection and analysis of the Editorial Projects in Education…

The current social and educational context that combines high-stakes accountability with ideals of supporting social, physical and emotional needs of children requires that today's school principals demonstrate vision, courage and skill to lead and advocate for effective learning communities in which all students reach their highest potential.…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) can bring a wide range of benefits--for children, parents and society at large. However, these benefits are conditional on "quality". Expanding access to services without attention to quality will not deliver good outcomes for children or long-term productivity benefits for society. This new publication…

Alternative education has its own history. Having emerged in the sixties as a response to the social crisis, its goal was primarily to fight increasing bureaucracy and the depersonalization of public education by giving students more freedom and minimal adult supervision. In the eighties, the understanding of "alternative education" narrowed to…

In recent years, teacher educators in the Netherlands and the USA have developed professional standards for their occupational groups. These standards have been used to identify the professional expertise of teacher educators, to analyse their professional development needs, and to provide assessment mechanisms for accreditation. This article…

Accountability is a concept that is well suited to the marketplace and a market-driven society, and it is appropriate when one wants to acquire a product made or sold by someone else. This commodification model is less effective when people pay for a service, rather than a product. The model becomes even more problematic when it is applied to…

This study examined whether instructional policies at the local level are becoming standardized as a result of state and federal accountability initiatives. A stratified random sample of 21 Virginia school districts was used, and the policies reviewed covered seven topics: class size, student grouping, homework, remedial instruction programs,…

The annual meeting of the ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) IQA (internal quality assurance) Group gathered some 60 participants in the premises of the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) in The Hague in June 2009. This seminar was a successful follow-up to the first ENQA IQA…

This volume lays out the essential arguments for the need for standard setting in educational assessment, discusses standard-setting methods and applications, and reviews current issues in standard setting, including legal challenges. (SLD)

This Evidence Based Education (EBE) Request seeks to provide an overview of recent research regarding school improvement and reform with special concentration on turning around chronically low-performing schools. The response is divided into four main sections: Research on Effective Methods for Turning Around Low-Performing Schools, Frameworks for…

Standard-setting research has yielded a rich array of more than 50 standard-setting procedures, but practitioners are likely to be confused about which to use. By synthesizing the accumulated research on standard setting and progress monitoring, this study developed a three-dimensional taxonomy for conceptualizing and operationalizing the various…

The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to "modernisation". A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob…

Over the past 35 years, the public, as well as state and federal policy makers, have increasingly pressured higher education to create a culture of evidence and, specifically, to account for student learning. While virtually all states report on collegiate learning using proxies (e.g., graduation rates), colleges and universities are now being…

Educational assessment and, more broadly, educational research in the United States have entered into an era characterized by a dramatic increase in the prevalence and importance of test score use in accountability systems. This volume covers a selection of contemporary issues about testing science and practice that impact the nation's public…