Our editor-at-large puts questions to a political scientist--the former higher-education advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq--who replies with skepticism about prospects for our efforts to restore a university system in Iraq and reconstitute that troubled society in our image. Building an informed democracy, John Agresto…

As Taiwan's state apparatus began to democratise, the question arose as to how teachers' practices might inform the wider process of contextual changes, i.e. societal, economic and political changes. This article explores this issue through an examination of how teachers seek to alter the relations of authority by arguing for independent teacher…

This article contends that students whose discourses differ from the dominant academic discourses of school may develop negative writer identities as a result of their language struggles in the academy. Using Critical Discourse analysis, the study explores the writer identities of two college writers in order to understand how embedded ideologies…

This paper examines the role of the state in the context of globalization. Taking up the specific case of Indian software engineers and their migration to the USA, the authors show the involvement of the Indian state and the US at different levels. The growth of the IT labour sector was based on changes in the higher education policy of the Indian…

This report was undertaken to assess the state of civic capacity for education reform in Philadelphia. It challenges community and civic sectors of the city to put aside individual interests and work together to mobilize resources to pursue the collective good of public school improvement. The report demonstrates that many of the elements…

A study of language attitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa, an area of 45 countries and over 1,700 languages, attempts to: (1) pinpoint attitudinal patterns towards European and indigenous languages; (2) give these attitudes historical perspective; (3) identify attitudes toward language use in education; (4) encourage language research on attitudes in…

The pool of candidates for urban superintendencies is dwindling, and those who take the jobs are likely to serve for only 2 or 3 years. This book explores contemporary conditions surrounding the urban superintendency and looks at the lives of 17 superintendents who were in office in large cities at the start of 1993. All were members of the…

This volume reports on a study of how political events and higher education leaders of the Cold War period influenced higher education campuses during that period. The study concludes that in many cases where faculty appointments were threatened by charges of political deviancy, it was higher administrators who failed to resist political…

This paper suggests that current paradigms and world views guiding research for social action are inadequate for directing rural community change in a high-tech, global community. For several generations, the agrarian and industrial paradigms have been accepted as appropriate for guiding social change and development. However, there are problems…

When Colorado's Tenure Reform Bill, House Bill 1159, was signed into law, the work of teachers was not significantly changed. However, the law did make some significant inroads in the work of administrators and streamlined the due process accorded to teachers in the event that dismissal becomes necessary. This paper addresses whether the…

"The Bell Curve" by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray has ignited a fierce academic debate. They assert that IQ as measured by tests has replaced family wealth and status in determining jobs, income, class, and place in American life; that whites average 15 IQ points higher than blacks; and that high-IQ ruling elites, with…

This book examines much of the large body of research on educational inequality in Britain since the Second World War, focusing on studies concerned with inequalities in the internal organization and functioning of the schools. A social constructionist approach to the study of social problems as a way of providing a reflexive perspective on the…

Critical debates about black expressive culture and black cultural productions within television are examined as a means of exploring processes by which questions about the American racial order, and blackness itself, are constructed, reproduced, and challenged. The central thread of the argument is that commercial culture operates as both a site…

The prominence of agenda items, the attendant controversy, and changes proposed in 5 areas of education reform were studied in 33 urban school districts during 1992 to 1995. Only a tiny fraction of the study of American politics has focused on school boards, their attendant bureaucracies, and the local political issues involved. This paper…

This paper first analyzes the situation of special needs education in the province of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) and then reports on qualitative research on three inclusive education initiatives in the province involving children with Down Syndrome at the primary school level. Current developments in the province include the continued existence…