In the current climate of emphasis on outcomes assessment, colleges and universities are working diligently to create assessment processes for student learning outcomes, competence in general education, student satisfaction with services, and electronic tracking media to document evidence of competence in graduates. Benchmarking has become a…

There are a number of reform initiatives underway in Turkey but some of these, which are concerned with curricular and structural changes, have encountered serious difficulties. This paper begins with a brief summary of school effectiveness and school improvement research guiding many educational reforms. It then gives some information about…

Over the past two decades, higher education in advanced capitalist societies has undergone a process of radical "reform". A key element of this reform has been the introduction of a number of accounting-based techniques in the pursuit of improved accountability and transparency. While the "old" accounting was to do with stewardship, the "new"…

A 10 year, longitudinal examination considered student performance for an Allied Health Distance Education (DE) program. The purpose was determining if students face-to-face in a classroom with an instructor performed differently than their counterparts located at a distance, taking class through an alternative delivery system. The question often…

How influential has the "US News" Best Colleges ranking been over the last twenty-five years since it was first started in 1983? In what ways does this influence manifest itself? There is strong evidence of the impact of the US News rankings among consumers, prospective students and their parents, and the higher education establishment in the…

Mirroring national trends, children of color in Washington state's King County are overrepresented at every point in the child welfare system and fare worse by most measures than are Caucasian children. The King County Coalition on Racial Disproportionality was formed to reduce and ultimately eliminate racial disproportionality in the county's…

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was tasked with identifying the key science concepts for science literacy in K-12 students in America (AAAS, 1990, 1993). The AAAS Atlas of Science Literacy (2001) has organized roughly half of these science concepts or benchmarks into fifty flow charts. Each flow chart or strand map…

The purpose of the provincial ESL (English as a second language) articulation process is to maintain high standards of quality in ESL programming at the public post-secondary institutions of British Columbia, as well as to facilitate access to programs at other public institutions for students wishing to transfer. This ninth edition of the ESL…

This article presents a model that instructional leaders can use to engage in a change process that fosters effective instructional change in school districts and individual school buildings, specifically middle schools and alternative middle schools. The authors describe four dimensions of leadership and explain how each dimension informs…

This report examines programmes for youth that combine learning in classrooms with participation in work in 10 Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. It is one element, together with the development of a network of policymakers and experts from the…

The Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE) was launched in 2007 as a companion survey to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). In its first two years, close to 140,000 entering first-year students at 197 institutions across the United States and Canada have participated in BCSSE. Now in its third year, BCSSE continues…

Senate Bill 1908 includes additional criteria for designating school grades for senior high schools with grades 9 through 12 or 10 through 12. Beginning in 2009-10, 50% of the school's grade will be based on the existing FCAT-related factors and the remaining 50% will be based on other factors including graduation rates, participation in…

With increased emphasis on state standards and assessments in science, one might question whether there is still a role for national science standards and benchmarks. This article makes a case for the importance of national guidelines and identifies key functions performed by the National Research Council's "National Science Education Standards"…

The new "Weighted Student Formula Yearbook 2009" from the Reason Foundation provides a simple framework for touting the successes of states and urban school districts that grant greater fiscal autonomy to schools. The report defines the Weighted Student Formula (WSF) reform extremely broadly, presenting a variety of reforms under the WSF umbrella.…

The Spellings Commission report stresses that higher education must become more accountable, more transparent, and more open to the scrutiny of its stakeholders. The key word is always "accountability," to which the canonical reaction among educators is a reaffirmation of the remarkable diversity of American colleges and universities and the…