The rise of accountability policies during the early 1990s coincided with an increase in the achievement gap between white and minority students, reversing decades of steady improvement in outcome equity. This article explores the policies that helped to reduce the achievement gap before 1990, the effects of the subsequent shift toward…

In this article, I discuss a Canadian public school controversy and Supreme Court of Canada decision involving competing stakeholder rights to freedom of religion, safety and equality. Policy considerations that allowed one group of stakeholders to express their constitutional rights raised concerns among other stakeholders. A policy vacuum and a…

Dozens of countries have decentralized at least part of their natural resource policies over the last two decades. Despite the length of time that these policy experiments have been in force, there is little agreement about their effectiveness. We argue that part of this ambivalence stems from three limitations of extant studies, suggesting that…

The core curriculum accompanied the development of the academic discipline with multiple names such as Kinesiology, Exercise and Sport Science, and Health and Human Performance. It provides commonalties for undergraduate majors. It is timely to renew this curriculum. Renewal involves strategic reappraisals. It may stimulate change or reaffirm the…

School education in Australia is a complex interplay between federal and state governments, and between government and non-government schools. This article explores the supervision of schools in Australia through school accountability systems. Utilising publicly available documents a systematic analysis of the state and territory systems for…

China's education system has grown increasingly complex, creating the need for an annual critical review of the education system by China's top scholars. The "Blue Book of Education," as it is known in Chinese, has gained a reputation for offering the most penetrating perspective in China on educational reform and development. In this…

This paper innovatively extends the application of transactional distance theory (TDT) to evidence-based policy development in Mauritius. In-depth interview data on student persistence from a range of stakeholders is used to understand the implications of distance education (DE) policy deficit. Policy deficit has surfaced as another dimension of…

Building upon a related 2005 panel presentation at the 25th annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, the authors, several tenure-track assistant professors and tenured associate professors who have participated in a Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community at Bowling Green State University, share their…

Since the announcement in 1999 of a plan to tie teachers' salary increases to student achievement by Denver Public Schools, there has been a flood of nationwide policy activity around teacher compensation. This paper examines pay plans in Denver, Toledo, Minneapolis, and New York City, offering a snapshot of the changing landscape of teacher…

A Friedman Foundation report attempts to find empirical support for the contention that competition from private schools, through voucher programs, improves the effectiveness of public schools. In the first year of Ohio's new EdChoice voucher program, the report claims to have found substantial academic gains at public schools exposed to the…

This practicum targeted a multi-service child and youth care agency in which lesbian women and gay men were implicitly excluded from serving as therapeutic foster parents. The setting in which the practicum project was developed, implemented, and evaluated is a not-for-profit, provincially chartered, and publicly-funded organization, headquartered…

This publication contains a set of five case studies and two analytical overview chapters that lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of the process of educational policy formation in Africa. Reflecting developments until late 1992, the cases include Botswana, Tanzania, Uganda, Mali, and Senegal. The articles describe and analyze current…

This special report reviews problems in Illinois' education funding system and discusses potential solutions to these problems. The report notes that the fundamental problem with the current education finance system is an over-reliance on local property taxes. Although property taxes are a relatively stable and lucrative revenue source,…

There is evidence that increasing the compensation of child care workers improves the quality of child care. This study was funded by the Child Development Division of the California Department of Education to identify policy options addressing the improvement of compensation for staff working in child care and development programs. The report…

The Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1986, the National Drug Control Strategy (1989-92), the Five-Year State Master Plan to Reduce Drug and Alcohol Abuse in California (1988-92), and the perspectives of education administrators (n=14) of drug prevention programs in select California public secondary schools (1994-95) were analyzed. The…