British government policies promoting public-private partnerships enabled the privatization of failing schools. In the U.S., the private sector has drawn upon a political network of well-financed institutions to advance privatized education, most recently among charter schools. Privatization has not yet been very successful, but promises to be…

Describes various mistakes or disasters in national educational planning involving international comparisons, manpower forecasting, vocational "relevance," and government intervention and financing. Advocates less reliance on vague "macroplanning" and more emphasis on specific policies addressing particular educational issues and on…

This article is the second in a 2-part synthesis of an international comparative seminar on the classification of children with disabilities. In this article, the authors discuss classification frameworks used in identifying children for the purpose of providing special education and related services. The authors summarize 7 papers that addressed…

Employing rigorous qualitative research methodology, we studied the implementation of two schools' uniform policies. Their primary intents were to eliminate competition, teach young people to dress appropriately, decrease nonacademic distractions, and lower the parental clothing costs. The young people differed with adults regarding whether or not…

We examine the connections between neo-liberal forms of state restructuring and intervention in disabled people's lives, looking in particular at how these have affected disabled women's experiences of an income support program, the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), in Ontario, Canada. We first outline why and how state programs have been…

This article discusses the following general questions: (1) what is the role of the teacher in the technology enhanced classroom; and (2) how are teachers prepared for the use of new technology in the classroom? The answers will differ among European countries due to, among other reasons, resources, national initiatives and available…

In 1993, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) challenged New York State's school financing system on the grounds that it failed to provide students sufficient opportunity for a sound basic education in New York City. CFE prevailed in 2003, after the case went before the New York Court of Appeals, and the state's funding system was determined to be…

Background: The Project Yi Jin (PYJ), an alternative pathway for secondary school leavers and adults to further their education, has been receiving full support from the government, the Federation for Continuing Education in Tertiary Institutions (FCE) in Hong Kong and the public. Graduates of PYJ have the equivalent academic status of their…

This study focuses on music education for children and adolescents offered by music and arts schools receiving public financial support (from the municipality or the state) and that are "independent" of the comprehensive and secondary school. For these purposes, then, "extra-curricular" music education will be understood as…

An important subset of issues involved in describing the process of educational globalization emerges when considering the reception, response and/or rejection of international proposals, ideologies and agents by indigenous national and regional educators. This case study describes and discusses how foreign/Western education proposals and policies…

For newly independent Central Asian republics a debate has arisen about how much of the aims, content and pedagogy of old Soviet-era curricula to retain, how much to revise or replace, and with what. There is a need to replace and revise textbooks, which are wearing out and outdated. Financial crisis has made the financial support of external…

Critical analysis of change in public policy within and across nations recognizes that the education and welfare of children, families, and all citizens is intertwined with economics, politics, and cultural discourse(s). In the United States, increasingly narrow media, judiciary, and academic discourses have supported legislative actions that…

Copyright law, together with the market logic it carries, penetrates deeply into our daily life. The copyright regime is so restrictive that it turns a normal learning process into a series of potential copyright violations. The Free Software Movement (FSM) represents a substantial community effort to counter this trend. It seeks to supersede the…

The main idea this article develops is the conceptual chaos, methodological tensions and epistemological conflicts that are being experienced in the field of environmental education as a result of the uncertainty generated by some institutions and international organisms. The authors' perspective starts from the idea that too many expectations…

This article analyses the increasingly diverse and sophisticated critique of "outcomes approaches" in vocational qualifications; critique which has now moved well beyond the early claims of reductivism and behaviourism. Avoiding a naive position on extraction of points of consensus, this article attempts to extract key issues which have…