In this Forum the authors suggest that a growing intensity of contradictory public and private interests in education is a persistent force in education development stemming from the increasing centrality of education in contemporary society. Contrasting South Korea's effective policies ensuring equality of educational opportunity with its…

Research in the implementation of inclusive education in international contexts shows that progress in the Global South appears to lag behind nations in the North. In this paper, I investigate this phenomenon not by associating it with regional cultural and socioeconomic resource limitations, but by reconsidering the assumptions within inclusive…

We present the argument that the meaning of child care and the policies that address it are explicitly linked with national ideologies, work force participation, economic success, and child outcomes. The relationship between family and child care policies is cyclical in nature, with a nation's ideology and vision of family often driving child care…

Over 21% of children in the United States today are poor, and the income gap between our nation's richest and poorest children has widened dramatically over time. This article considers children's self-regulation as a key mediating mechanism through which poverty has deleterious consequences for their later life outcomes. Evidence from field…

The objective of this dissertation is to explore the socio-cultural contextualization of the digital divide in Japanese society. I undertake this task by developing a theoretical and methodological framework based on the notion of "culture as models," while explicating the cultural dimensions of the digital divide and the dynamics of…

Throughout the world, the demand for higher education is increasing exponentially, pushed forward by the realities of a global economy and accompanied by pressure to open up opportunities for prospective students from all backgrounds. The importance of a knowledgeable, highly skilled population has become clear and many countries have made great…

The model currently guiding educational policy development--constructing crises and crafting solutions--has a long, unproductive history. To shrug off American education's perpetual crisis mode, educators should expand their descriptive vocabularies, apply the "so what" test, adopt demonstrably effective solutions, eschew a crisis…

The state of development of a nation and of the higher education system within the nation are important factors to consider when making decisions about the applicability of policy and planning methodologies. Strategic methodologies, policy domain, and planning domain are discussed. (MLW)

The extent to which Army enlistments represent a cross-section of the national male population was determined in this study of available Army enlistee data. Quantitative data from several existing sources are used, including the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) and the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Focus of the analysis is on the…

This article discusses the difficult issues of balancing faculty and university rights and responsibilities regarding courseware developed either as commissioned or non-commissioned work in higher education. The article addresses the varied concerns among university personnel and higher education institutions, reviews two major models for…

An institutional political process model for comparing social welfare policies is presented. Principal elements include each country's societal values, government institutions (operationalized as the role of interest groups), policy goals, and welfare system type. The model is demonstrated through a comparison of the dissimilar social welfare…

Unlike many other countries of the world, the United States and Canada have yet to use distance education as a deliberate instrument of a comprehensive public policy agenda. Despite this shared failure to use distance education to advance public policy, the individual states of the United States and Canada's provinces differ widely in their…

This monograph describes the Transition to Work Simulator (TWS) so that the National Institute of Education can evaluate its capability in helping recommend policy suggestions to the United States Congress on the future of vocational education in America. (The TWS is a pre-implementation laboratory for testing economic and lifestyle impacts of…

Access to higher education in Western industrialized countries in the 1960s and 1970s and structural policies are reviewed, along with policies on institutional patterns in the Federal Republic of Germany and the outcomes of the policies. Higher education policy in almost all Western industrial societies neither expanded in response to the…

This report discusses a nationwide study of Adult Performance Level (APL) which involved sixteen projects in seven states and was conducted to (1) examine the University of Texas at Austin's APL study and describe the results and recommendations in terms of the adult needs in New York State; (2) examine several New York State Adult Basic Education…