Discusses trend of "takeovers" of low-performing big-city school districts by skilled outsiders and argues that success depends on how schools are overseen rather than who oversees them. Describes optimum district environment for success and argues structure and accountability ultimately more important than person in charge. (KSB)

Examined how teachers were impacted by California's Proposition 227, highlighting changes in teaching styles and beliefs about the proposition and its effectiveness. Teachers had to change their teaching strategies to accommodate the new curriculum. They were not sufficiently trained for immediate implementation of English-only education. Teaching…

The development of a new Indigenous Nations Studies program at the University of Kansas is described. Success depended on a critical mass of Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty and students that had a sense of political and social justice and understood the need for institutional change. The biggest challenge was countering the entrenched…

Reports that the dual enrollment program at Santa Monica College (SMC) in California aims to serve underrepresented student populations, particularly in light of the dismantling of affirmative action programs in California. The overall goal of the program is to increase the pool of students qualifying for competitive colleges and universities. (NB)

The emergence of postsecondary educational institutions in the Canadian North reflects a growing multidisciplinary and international cooperation and a change in attitudes toward the North. The ability to study in their home regions has increased Northern students' postsecondary attendance; substantial courses in Northern themes are available; and…

In the shadow of a Manhattan housing project, Public School 33 is coming back to life. A new principal has brought a wave of optimism, test scores are way up, and middle-class families who used to avoid the school are enrolling their children. In Brooklyn, teenagers who might have dropped out of school are getting diplomas through a special…

This article concerns an issue that often remains implicit within the public debate about affirmative action and related race-conscious education policies: What role do contested moral ideals play in the disagreement about affirmative action? As background, the article first outlines what a moral disagreement is and then goes on to examine the…

This article revisits the underlying principles of the citizenship curriculum in England to address reports of communication breakdowns between schools and students and to consider whether the curriculum can do anything other than prescribe what democratic participation should be. Although the focus is on the curriculum in England, it has…

This article comments on leadership within mainstream literature on school effectiveness/improvement, where it is almost always considered to be a factor of change. The article argues that systemic school improvement, particularly for disadvantaged children, is inextricably linked to wider social, economic and political conditions--in South…

Belief in the importance of school readiness has mobilized a broad coalition of concerned stakeholders to become organized and act. As a result, a number of programs, policies, and materials have been developed to improve the readiness of children and of schools. The purpose of this article is to examine the context in which these efforts are…

This paper takes the vigorous political debate unleashed in Germany by the results of the PISA study as a stimulus to take a closer look at the strategic aims and effects of the current education reforms, of which the PISA study is only one example. It shows that the reform measures underpin a powerful process of normalisation. In this context,…

In France, technology is a compulsory school discipline at the junior high school level (ages 11-15). Technology studies were initiated at the beginning of the 1960s when school attendance until the age of 16 became mandatory and when it was decided to delay vocational training because of the irreversible drive towards technical modernity, a…

Campus teaching is not independent of campus politics. Quality of teaching is partly a function of who cares. The complexity of the disciplines taught is not justification for indifference to the needs of students--and the needs of the public, and the state, and the campus administrative offices, and the instructors. Teaching is not merely a…

When independence was restored in Lithuania, a single-stage higher education system that had existed hitherto was reorganised into a multi-stage system with Bachelor, Master and Doctoral programme studies. The analysis of Master studies, as a new and atypical phenomenon in Lithuania, highlights the discrepancies between Master programme curricula…

The Moral and Social Action Interdisciplinary Colloquium (MOSAIC) is an international multidisciplinary network of scholars working within the fields of the philosophy, psychology and sociology of moral development, moral education and moral thought. MOSAIC runs an annual conference, traditionally in June or July. This conference attracts an…