The current status of the Lebanese vocational and technical education (VTE) system is assessed and the strategic issues and challenges facing it are identified. In addition to the economic and social challenges that are common to many developing countries, the Lebanese system suffers from idiosyncratic problems, which may require innovative and…

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 There is a need to replace and revise textbooks, which are wearing out and outdated.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…

With the performance of students, teachers, and schools defining success under current standards-based accountability policies (e.g. Chicago Public Schools (Note 1); "No Child Left Behind Act," (United States Department of Education, 2002)), school districts are implementing various forms of intervention programs as a means to improve…

As the 50th anniversary of the landmark "Brown v. Board of Education" decision arrives, a notably gesellschaftliche (individualist, freedom-oriented, rationalist) paradigm in the education policy agenda prevails. That is to say, in the wake of a series of Supreme Court decisions and the proliferation of publicly funded, ethnocentric charter…

This paper is a reflective-reflexive examination of provisions of trustworthiness in critical narrative research. The author presents her understanding of provisions of trustworthiness as a science and as an art, and blurs these boundaries as she acknowledges their tension in practice. She weaves between theory and her experience in two…

A troubling aspect of international schools is their dearth of academic discourse. Mark Bray has observed that two characteristics of international schools contribute to such a lack of research: first, the smallness of the sector; and second, and more important, the fact that such schools lie outside the mainstream local education system, serving…

This article focuses on the latest developments in higher educational policy in the Russian Federation and the influence of international organizations such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on these policies and education reforms. This article's primary purpose is to explore how the newly…

With Christianity and the Jewish religion, Islam has been the leading divine religion, accepted and obeyed by millions over a large geography since its declaration in the early 7th century. In this article, the authors shed light on some milestones in Islamic civilization, such as the golden age, the Abbasids, the Ottomans, and the rise of Western…

Three papers are included herein: (1) Pernicious Politicization in Academe (Luann Wright); (2) Victims of the One-Sided Campus (Mike Ratliff); and (3) Advocacy in the College Classroom (Anne D. Neal). Each paper was delivered on April 22, 2006 at a California Association of Scholars conference at the Annenberg School on the campus of the…

This review examines twenty years of research (1985-2005) on African-American students in science education. This analysis identified three types of research studies on African-Americans. First, a series of studies provided status reports of African-American students' performance in science. Second, a series of studies highlighted cultural…

Prior to 1994, the presence of minority belief systems and values in education were largely ignored in South Africa. It could be expected that after ten years of democracy students' understanding of, for instance, the values of inclusivity and diversity in a multicultural society in general and tertiary education in particular should not be in…

While plurilingualism is not necessarily a novel concept, the author argues that the ability to speak several languages will help Europeans to develop a European identity and to deconstruct existing cultural and even genetic barriers. To this aim it would make sense to be introduced at a very early age to elements of language and culture from…