Teacher pension systems concentrate retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine the…

The 1988 University Autonomy Act conferred Portuguese universities with a considerable degree of autonomy and designed a governance system based on collegiality. Strong participation of academic and non-academic staffs and students in decisions became the rule and democratic elections of all individual or collective governance bodies were the…

A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Guided by Fairclough's approach to CDA, this study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from "The Globe and Mail" and "The National Post", the policy…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the author's commentary on the special issue of "Journal of Educational Administration" entitled "Systemwide Reform: Examining Districts under Pressure". Design/methodology/approach: The author gives her personal opinions, draws upon her recent experiences in the national…

While a great deal of attention has been given to evaluating how well policies are implemented, that is, how well they are realised in practice, less attention has been paid to understanding and documenting the ways in which schools actually deal with the multiple, and sometimes opaque and contradictory demands of different "types" of…

Social web services catalog users' activities across the Internet, aggregating, analyzing, and selling a vast array of user data to be used largely for consumer profiling and target marketing. This article interrogates the tacit agreements and terms-of-use policies that govern who owns user data, how it circulates, and how it can be used. Relying…

Lesbians and gay men have historically been derided, harassed, silenced and made invisible in Australia. This prejudice and discrimination has been reinforced structurally through social, cultural and political institutions. Although sexual orientation is now included in state and territory anti-discrimination legislation, and recent federal…

Many colleges and universities have established student learning outcomes for diversity education as a part of their broad undergraduate education program. These education goals, developed for assessment purposes or other policies, reflect a range of possible diversity and multicultural learning purposes. The emphasis on some purposes, and the…

This paper examines the relationship between skills prices (wage premiums) and inequality in migrant sending countries (mainly from Latin America) and explores the implications for education policies. Most of the evidence is based on the case of Mexico, a Latin American country that is also an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development…

This article critically examines the Labour Party's policies for local school systems, focusing on its proposals for regional Directors of School Standards, for academies and free schools, and for local democracy, and offers an alternative approach.

In 2005, to address concerns about students who might fall in the "gap" between the regular assessment and the alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS), the U.S. Department of Education announced that states could develop alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards (AA-MAS). This article…

Various studies have investigated the views of higher education staff and students about sustainability, yet educational developer perspectives are under-represented in the research. This project gathered educational developer perspectives about sustainability in the curriculum. It sought to capture their views about a national sustainability…

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so "drenched in the past," the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt…

Successive republican governments in France have constructed a complex educational context, which is rhetorically committed to a myth of provision of educational equality of opportunity whilst in practical terms it is characterised by a system focused on the production and reproduction of elites. This article aims to consider the political drivers…

This article reports on findings from a scan of 465 policies relevant to the handling of cyberbullying in 74 Canadian universities. It first assesses the commonalities and differences in the policies. Second, it considers how their various lenses--a human rights perspective versus a student conduct perspective, for instance--can affect the…