Institutional debt, also referred to as direct-to-school debt, is debt owed by students to their college or university for unpaid tuition, fees, room and board, education benefit overpayments, or fines. Unpaid tuition is the most common debt and can arise if a student enrolled with the expectation of aid that did not come through, or if a student…

Though government funding has shrunk, Nepal's higher education (HE) sector has expanded in the last three decades in terms of the establishment of new institutions and the implementation of a series of projects funded by the World Bank. Using neoliberal instrumentalism as a theoretical framework and critical policy sociology as a methodological…

Purpose: Taking the case of educational reform in French-speaking Belgium (the "Pact for Educational Excellence"), this article aims to describe the process of integrating evidence-based education (EBE) into an educational reform within a country where the influence of qualitative research is important. Design/Approach/Methods: A…

Structural change approaches--also known as policy and environmental changes--are becoming increasingly common in health promotion, yet our understanding of how to evaluate them is still limited. An exploratory scoping review of the literature was conducted to understand approaches and methods used to evaluate structural change interventions in…

This contribution is based on an analysis of recent changes in doctoral education that can be observed in Europe and China. It traces the policies having led to these changes and discusses related policy transfer. The contribution is divided into five parts. It begins by sketching recent changes in doctoral education in the framework of the…

Many students in our school system are being forced out of the classroom due to harsh discipline policies focused on rules rather than the child and the contextualized infraction. These policies punish them by taking away the very thing that could possibly change their lives, their education. The way we deal with behavior issues in the classroom…

Teacher shortages in special education have been a source of long-standing concern for professionals and parents involved in the education of students with disabilities. Because of their geographic location, culture, and lack of resources, rural administrators have always struggled to staff their schools with qualified special education teachers.…

South Korea has achieved the rank of high tech nations of 21 century, 100% literacy and 100% schools with internet connectivity in a span of 20 years. There are several factors responsible for these notable achievements. Optimal and effective integration of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in education is one of the main reasons…

Since the early 1990s, lifelong learning has become a major policy concern for the European Union, being seen as a means for enabling individuals to be more competitive in social and economic contexts that are continually changing. After a series of white papers and strategies in the field of lifelong learning, the EU launched the Lifelong…

What evidence supports the call for discipline reform? How might alternative strategies affect students and schools? In this article, the authors describe the critiques of exclusionary discipline and then examine the research base on which discipline policy reform rests. They also describe the alternative approaches that are gaining traction in…

In this Policy Memo, the author considers the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's newest effort, focused on "Networks for School Improvement," and how this initiative can learn from the Foundation's own past initiatives as well as from research evidence more generally. The author worries that in K-12 education, the Foundation has…

The authority of the nation states and their capacity to govern their education policy has been reconfigured by the processes of globalisation. This paper examines recent education policy in Pakistan in order to reveal the nature of national authority in education policy-making in a challenging context. The central piece of analysis is the…

Looking to conflicting constitutions of education systems through the terms equality and excellence, this paper examines the discursive formation of two political rationalities in the contemporary German education system. While early childhood and primary education discourses are dominated by a terminology of equality, tertiary education…

The intersection of development in family and school settings has been well established and education policies have begun to promote ways to bridge the two contexts (i.e. teacher evaluations). For this manuscript, authors focus on how teachers and principals used a state educator evaluation policy to position parents as authorities on education.…

This was an exploratory qualitative study utilizing tenets of phenomenology to examine the lived experiences of front-line student services professionals in Admissions and Financial Aid and their dilemmas in interpreting and implementing California Assembly Bill 540 (2001) in their interactions with undocumented students. Front-line student…