Governments and development agencies met at Jomtien in 1990 and Dakar in 2000 and committed themselves to achieve "Education for All" (EFA). Most aid to education is now the umbrella of EFA and its associated goals, targets and indicators. This paper selects some of the indicators used for EFA and analyses their strengths and weaknesses. Gross and…

Following the U.S. financial crisis of 2008, demands on our social safety nets grew as federal, state, and local revenues declined. Projected shortfalls are forcing deep cuts in state and local services including education. It is too early to know fully the nature of the cuts or impacts on various communities and constituencies. This article looks…

This article examines the differential development of higher education governance in two Central and Eastern European countries since 1989. In current discourse, the market-oriented model of higher education governance has established itself as an anchor point towards which systems are gradually converging. At the same time international…

This article presents an assessment of the impact and implications of the international mobilities operating in the national public policy environment. In fact, patterns of transformations that take place in national higher education systems are generating diverse and complex outcomes in different countries, in ways that may preclude a simple…

Since the break up of the USSR, its former republics have seen the emergence and rapid expansion of an examinations industry that was, to all intents and purposes, unknown in Soviet times. New national assessment agencies have been established and been charged with, amongst other things, developing high-stakes exams to replace the diverse and…

In 2006 the North American Council for Online Learning surveyed the activity and policy relating to primary and secondary e-learning, which they defined as online learning, in a selection of countries. They found most were embracing e-learning delivery of education as a central strategy for enabling reform, modernising schools, and increasing…

In this article we explore ways in which pro-market discourses have been interpreted in policy initiatives in Argentina since the 1970s. Our argument is that even though pro-market discourses have guided reforms in many aspects of public policies in Argentina, the arena of education has overall been resistant to taking them up. The first part of…

Many microfinance advocates claim that micro-credit has a positive effect on the educational outcomes of the children of micro-credit borrowers, and that these educational improvements provide us with evidence that micro-credit institutions are serving the social function for which they have been designed. This paper draws attention to this area…

This article begins an investigation of the educational system of Morocco and its context of language diversity. It examines the Moroccan cultural environment and the ways the multilingualism and education of its people has been and continues to be influenced by geography, colonization periods, religion, and history. The effects of the Educational…

Since its creation in 1958, the European Social Fund (ESF) has played a major role in supporting the development of vocational training in the Member States. However, compared to other, more recently launched, EU programmes and initiatives in the area of education and training, the ESF has not made a significant contribution to the debate about…

The goal of this article is to examine how the provincial education media in China play a role of forging consensus among local actors responsible for the implementation of new centrally-promulgated youth socialization policy. In doing so, it also explores the tension among three of the Chinese state's claims to legitimacy: economic development,…

This paper explores two inter-connected issues--the state's role in educational development and educational contribution to economic development--in the policy processes entailed by the South Korean state's pursuit of economic development during the Park Chung Hi era, 1961-1979. It disputes the statist view that South Korea's economic development…

The paper draws on critical discourse analysis to examine and discuss some of the key developments in the governing of education in Scotland since the election of the Scottish National Party (SNP) government in May 2007. It analyses these developments, drawing on a study of key policy texts and suggests that discourse analysis has much to…

In 2000 in Dakar, 164 countries reaffirmed the vision of the World Declaration on Education for All (Jomtien, 1990), that all children, young people and adults have the human right to benefit from an education that will meet their basic learning needs in the best and fullest sense of the term, an education that includes learning to know, to do, to…

This book is about the threats to education quality in the developing world that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews the observed phenomenon of service delivery failures in public education: cases where programs and policies increase the inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts--in schools and…