Being in the company of teachers is at the heart of the Coalition. The center of Ted Sizer's work, of his life, of CES, is the life of the teacher. "Horace's Compromise," the first of Sizer's well known series about teachers and school change, imparted a sympathetic portrait of Horace Smith, a teacher trying to make a difference in a system…

Documentaries can be used as a pedagogical tool to better understand social policy. This medium is especially suited to provide perspectives that often go unheard in policy debates, academic discussions, and textbooks. While many social work educators use documentary films, there is little discussion about this media in the social work literature.…

This paper reviews some of the most popular policy evaluation methods in empirical microeconomics: social experiments, natural experiments, matching, instrumental variables, discontinuity design, and control functions. It discusses identification of traditionally used average parameters and more complex distributional parameters. The adequacy,…

The discussion in this article is based on recent research carried out by the author recently on adult education public policies and her participation in the Adult Learning Practitioners in Europe (ALPINE) project coordinated by Research voor Beleid (The Netherlands) and funded by the European Commission. The analysis presented here stresses the…

The Researching Academies (RA) Conference, hosted by the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham on 12 November 2008 and organised by the authors, was a unique one-day event, funded as part of a research project (a case study of an Academy) supported by a British Academy (BA) grant, with additional support and funding from BELMAS. The RA…

This paper argues that the content, analytical approaches and institutional affiliations of authors of articles published in the latest issues of two leading educational policy studies journals provide useful insights into the contested nature of educational policy studies. The paper draws upon a selection of articles published in 2007/08 issues…

With the passage of Goals 2000, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the Education Science Reform Act of 2002, Congress has put a priority on a science curriculum for children that is based on research on the best practices in science education. According to the U.S. Department of Education, teachers "need to know what programs and…

Stemming from my article entitled, "Teachers and the Policy Reform Agenda: What is Policy?," this article refers to the changing landscape of educational policy analysis. Policy influences the nature of teaching and learning and if teachers are to re-centre teachers' voices and combat the neo-liberal agenda underpinning public education, they must…

The introduction of performance management in South Australian public schools raises a number of issues regarding the structure, purpose and control of the process itself and the consequences of teacher evaluation. Performance management has the potential to shape teaching and the culture of schools according to what it values and what it ignores.…

The majority of the research on grading practices thus far examines teachers' perceived grading practices through Likert-type surveys and vignettes regarding generic students. This study is unique because it proposes a more systematic method of qualitative inquiry to examine how teachers perceive grading on an individual student basis by asking…

Background. This project was motivated by the impressive growth that scholarly/scientific journals in Latin America have shown in recent decades. That advance is attributed to global, regional, and national pressures and trends, as well as a response to obstacles that scholars/researchers from the region face to be published in prestigious…

Over the last 20 years, technology and education policy discourse in Alberta, Canada has been philosophically polarized and dominated by value-neutral ways of thinking about technology (Brooks, 2011). While technology policy implementation has significant ramifications for schools and systems, for much of this time, system leaders, specifically…

The modernization of Russia requires people to be trained for a modern economy, for technological development, and for the sphere of state, regional, and corporate management. Accomplishing this complex task has been assigned to the "New School" policy, approved in 2010. The present article examines ways of dealing with problems that…

The article focuses on the similarities and differences in using new public management (NPM) administrative arrangements in educational policy as they have been presented in the educational reform process carried out this millennium by two governments in Norway: the Centre-Conservative government and the current Red-Green coalition government.…

Prevailing anti-violence practices in public schools, especially in the context of recently increased emphasis on bullying, often allocate more resources to surveillance and control than to facilitation of healthy relationships or conflict/ peace learning. This policy emphasis increases the risks of marginalization and reduces opportunities for…