This article investigates the effect of schools' organizational features on teacher staffing decisions at the secondary level cross-nationally. I examine the importance of the principal's administrative leadership style and school-level autonomy in making staffing decisions to understand variation in assignments of out-of-field teachers (OFT) to…

This report, the first in the series, points out that, while urban families increasingly have access to a variety of school options--including charter schools--many rural families have just a single school option. There are numerous examples of rural charter schools that have done great things for students while also benefiting the larger…

The fundamental changes taking place in the global economy pose an existential threat for high-wage economies like the United States. Countries with high-wage economies will either figure out how to convert their mass education systems into systems that can educate virtually all their students to the standards formerly reserved for their elites,…

In recent years many charter public schools in Massachusetts have increased the number of English language learners (ELLs) that they enroll. A 2010 amendment to the charter school law has made it easier for charter schools to recruit English language learners. The success that many charter schools have had with this subset of students defies…

Parental demand for charter schools is at an all-time high. The goal of a high-performing charter school policy is to increase access to the best charter schools by identifying schools with a demonstrated record of improving student learning and giving those schools the opportunity to grow. This policy overview document introduces charter schools,…

Examining legislative change between 1997 and 2013, and analyzing the governance of Manitoba's post-secondary system using military concepts of strategy, operations, and tactics, this article argues that there has been a trend since 2006 of a general loss of university autonomy in the province. The article finds that changes in public policy in…

Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of professors from the national to…

Over the past two decades, public higher education has become widely recognized for its contribution to socio-economic adjustment. This paper probes its evolution in two large and affluent democracies, the United States and Germany, whose higher education systems represent distinct ideal types. The analysis argues that public authorities in both…

In 2009, the Finnish parliament passed a new Universities Act that aimed to strengthen the institutional autonomy of the country's universities. But why and how did the idea of autonomy come to frame the reform agenda in the overt way it did? In analysing a sample of authoritative policy and strategy papers by the key stakeholders in the higher…

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive, accessible and strategic overview of what is currently known about school and system reform in the early twenty-first century. It reflects on the knowledge that has been acquired from research, policy and practice over the past three decades and presents it in a way that provides frameworks…

The conditions required for a reform of the educational finance system as the foundation of compulsory education are 1) devolution to schools and introduction of national standards in order to deal with "individual equality" while compensating for the insufficiency of "aspectual equality," and 2) dealing with educational needs…

This article investigates the effect of school autonomy on multiple measures of student achievement, combining the individual data of the students participating in the International Civics and Citizenship Survey with their results in the national high stakes standardized tests at the end of eighth grade administered by the Italian National…

Over the past few decades, the figure of the market has clearly made its way into the field of education. For some authors, it represents an alternative to regulation by the public authorities, a different form of co-ordination which is better able to meet the objectives of the education systems. Through a secondary analysis of the PISA 2006…

This study investigates how recent policies employed under states' waivers to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) intersect with charter schools' purpose and functioning. By collecting and analyzing all ESEA waivers granted in 2013, we find that charter schools are disproportionately represented among schools as identified in the…

For nearly four years, governors and state legislators have focused on little else in higher education but cutting budgets to deal with historic gaps in revenue. Now, with higher-education support at a 25-year low, lawmakers are considering some policy changes that have been off-limits in the past, such as consolidating campuses and eliminating…