Average resident undergraduate tuition and fees for the academic year 2013-14 at public two-year institutions in the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) region (excluding California) increased by 3.2 percent ($106) from the previous year, while published prices at public four-year institutions grew by 3.1 percent ($231). By…

This single case study examines how stakeholders of a local education agency (LEA) understand and implement state turnaround policy for its chronically underperforming schools. While there is ample research on how to improve chronically underperforming schools, that research becomes limited when looking at turnaround implementation actions that…

An increasing number of states are mandating teacher performance be considered in educator employment decisions, including awarding tenure and layoffs, according to a 50-state policy review of teacher tenure laws. Tenure laws have historically granted job protections based on years of employment. The Education Commission of the States (ECS)…

Background: One way to address tobacco use by youth is for primary and secondary schools to adopt and implement comprehensive tobacco policies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the comprehensiveness of tobacco policies in St. Louis County, Missouri public school districts. Methods: We evaluated the strength of tobacco policies from all 23…

Internationalisation of higher education has been overwhelmingly embraced by Canadian universities (Beck 2009). Yet, the decentralised nature of higher education institutions, coupled with the absence of a national governing body with responsibility for higher education, creates an interesting terrain for internationalisation. In this paper, I…

Since the late 1990s, many European countries have adapted their traditional one-cycle curriculum structure in higher education to the two-cycle structure employed in the Anglo-American world. In the large social science literature dealing with this reform phenomenon, the Bologna Process -- starting with the 1999 Declaration of Bologna -- is…

In this article about the Common Core State Standards and mathematics, the author wanted to point out what's familiar in these standards and to give teachers clear access to what's different about them. She wanted to emphasize what has made her passionate about the Common Core standards--which is their two-part structure: Standards for…

Public policies can be effective in raising people's social inclusion as intended only reasonably through their implementation. With respect to the implementation perspective, this study examines the effectiveness of eight policies as perceived to implement in Hong Kong, China. The study employs data collected from 1,109 Chinese adults randomly…

Variations in educational policy outcomes have always been perceived as policy failures, and they are often associated with policymakers insensitivity to what is happening down at the grass roots level, and with implementers' inefficiency and non-compliance. Based on institutional theory, the nested layers theory in particular, and the Four…

Our cross-case analysis employed a Layers of Analysis Framework (LoAF) to establish its use as a methodological framework for deconstructing policy text in education. Existing methods of analysis are largely theoretical and lack concrete procedures for analytic replication. Robust measures of investigation are needed to enhance policy studies and…

The reduction of socio-economic inequalities in school outcomes was a major priority of the Coalition Government in England from 2010-15. In this paper we examine the Coalition's policies and spending, including an analysis of the distributional effect of its pupil premium policy. We also look at trends in outcomes up to 2014. We find that…

The higher skills policy of the UK New Labour Government emerged from the recommendations of the Leitch Review of Skills, and was implemented in England between 2007 and 2010. The policy aimed to encourage higher education (HE) institutions to engage with employers and employer representative bodies to design and deliver HE provision that…

Through a comparison of France and Germany, this article investigates why the overall conception of multilingualism promoted by the education systems of the two countries favours the teaching of "useful" European standard languages over that of minority and migrant languages that are conceived in merely cultural terms. Adopting a…

The purpose of this study is to describe, analyse and evaluate the successive comprehensive reforms in Spain as a "paradigmatic" example of the emergence, evolution and crisis of the comprehensive school. In the first part, we describe the development of the comprehensive school project (1970-2013), using the image of the life cycle,…

Grounded in policy-relevant research, the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida is focused on supporting local, state, and national postsecondary policy development as well as training the next generation of institutional leaders. IHE conducts rigorous scholarship focused on postsecondary policy analysis and supporting the…