This article is a response to recent revealing political attempts to set a political and social function for the Arts through the establishment of performance criteria. A long-standing feature of the historical development of government policy in the UK has been attempts to judge the effectiveness and efficiency of public activity (health,…

The author introduces William Barton Rogers, conceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who pursued two interrelated careers in nineteenth-century America: one centered on his activities in science and the other on his higher educational reform efforts. This essay explores one theme in Rogers' scientific and educational…

In this article, the author discusses her comparative study of the history of the welfare state in the United States, England, and France, she studies some of the usual features of the welfare state, which include important entitlement programs, such as social insurance, and protective labor legislation, but she also focuses on the development of…

In this article the author looks at the appropriation of the monitorial system of education across a number of Spanish American countries between 1818 and c. 1844. The British understanding of the method is compared with the Spanish American perception of it (privileging the similarities rather than the differences in perception among Spanish…

This paper draws on research into the teaching of "race" and ethnicity in higher education, including interviews with lecturers and students of specialist sociology of "race" options. It focuses particularly on interactional issues: the conversations conducted about "race" and ethnicity within seminar rooms were often…

The last 30 years have witnessed ongoing calls for the reform of post-14 education, to make it more responsive to the needs of employers and the economy, and overcome the academic-vocational divide. This article maps out recent proposals and changes in 14-19 education to remind us that they are rooted in a complex past, and while they might appear…

The child development knowledge teachers use every day to inform their actions has the potential to both enable and constrain children's learning because it permits teachers to view children from only one vantage point. In this article, the authors argue that in addition to teachers updating their developmental knowledge base, it is important for…

This article combines a historical with a social/political anthropological framework to examine the role played by the transfer of educational discourse between the United States-based Phelps-Stokes Fund and the Belgian Ministry of Colonies in the formulation of the colonial education policy of "adapted education" in the 1920s. The…

The same factors appear to drive early childhood policy in all parts of the world, including the importance accorded to early childhood education, national goals, governments' beliefs about their role in the early care and education of young children, governments' regulations of early childhood services, and the background and characteristics of…

This paper examines an important development in Chinese higher education in the late 1990s and early 2000s, namely, its radical expansion of enrollment starting from 1998. After a brief review of the related literature on educational expansion, the paper analyzes the higher education expansion in China in detail. The paper argues that a variety of…

Taiwanese textbooks play a central role in Taiwanese education. In the wake of the political reform and social protest movements of the 1970s and 1980s that prompted Taiwanese educational reform, critics have charged that traditional curricula tend to reinforce the dominant national Chinese cultural identity. The purpose of this article is to…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

The global economy has "flattened" the world in terms of skills and technology. A new workforce of problem-solvers, innovators, and inventors who are self-reliant and able to think logically is one of the critical foundations that drive innovative capacity in a state. The K-12 (kindergarten through grade 12) education system, with the…

This book is intended to serve as a stimulus for discussion of what is needed to provide all American children with a world-class education opportunity and to make education a top priority in every state and the country as a whole. A range of contributors offer a diverse number of possible solutions to the current educational crisis in American…

This book, the first volume of the paperback versions of the "The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, Third Edition," takes a look at the field from a broadly theoretical perspective, and is composed of the Handbook's Parts I ("Locating the Field"), II ("Major Paradigms and Perspectives"), and VI ("The Future of Qualitative Research"). "The…