Purpose: A burgeoning literature investigates the importance of student teaching placements for teacher candidate development, but an important perspective that is largely missing from the existing literature is that of the school districts that host student teachers. In this paper, we describe the student teaching process from the perspective of…

Educational policy borrowing has become rather common in our globalised world. However, the literature lacks contextual criteria that may be employed by researchers and policy makers to assess the correspondence of a particular policy to the local context of a borrowing system. Based on a secondary analysis of documents and research reports, this…

This overview identifies some common features of macro-level language planning and briefly summarises the changing approaches to the analysis of macro-planning in the field. It previews six cases of language-in-education planning in response to linguistic diversity presented by the contributors to this issue. The cases show how macro-planning can…

The Chinese National Quality Course Plan is a large-scale project by the Ministry of Education, which has led to the production of more than 12,000 courses from some 700 universities since 2003. This paper describes in detail the purpose of the project and how it is organized at all levels, including how individual courses get selected at…

This policy profile on education in the Netherlands is part of the new Education Policy Outlook series, which presents comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Building on the substantial comparative and sectorial policy knowledge base available…

In many countries, education legislation embodies contradictory pressures for centralization and decentralization. In the United Kingdom, there is growing government control over policy and direction of schools; schools are also being given more responsibility for resource management. "Moving" schools within Improving the Quality of…

The convergence of two apparently opposite theories of urban educational reform is analyzed as it occurs in three middle schools in a New York City school district. The first theory, emphasizing small schools of choice, promotes close relationships between students and adults in distinctive school programs. The second--centralized, standards-based…