Although U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ultimately decides which states get relief from key requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, a group of outside judges will wield tremendous influence in deciding states' fates. With states facing compliance deadlines under the law and Congress moving slowly on reauthorizing the Elementary and…

The author reports on House and Senate bills that take different stances toward funding formula-grant programs and Obama administration initiatives. Key education programs, including Title I grants for disadvantaged students and aid for special education, would get flat funding for the 2012 fiscal year under a measure approved Sept. 21 by the…

Under the guise of increasing quality and accountability, many urban teacher education programs and professional development models characterize educators as mere transmitters of standardized content knowledge. The authors argue that such dehumanizing practices, which are rooted in the discourse of neoliberalism, prevent teachers from helping…

This chapter examines how the previously distinct worlds of early childhood education (ECE) and K-12 public school education are being drawn together through the recent and rapid advances of prekindergarten programming in the United States. Tensions around teaching philosophies, teacher qualifications, and financing are presented to illustrate the…

This article historicizes the collision of K-12 public schooling and early childhood education by interrogating the ways in which people called for and implemented the public kindergarten into primary school over the past century. Using a theoretical framework that pays attention to the ways in which policy develops over time we provide a…

The political emphasis on early education speaks of growing expectations for equal access and the need to ensure quality--by way of standard accountability measures--on behalf of all young children. A central element in the improvement of early education focuses on teacher quality. In this article we examine and discuss the challenges related to…

This paper uses Bourdieu's concept of field to analyse findings from an ethnographic study of Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in England. Entry to Employment is a work-based learning programme which aims to re-engage young people with "barriers to learning" inhibiting access to further education, training or employment. The paper…

This article explores the changing attitudes towards student accommodation in higher education in the United Kingdom since the end of the Second World War. In the first part of this period there was a firm assumption, in universities and teacher training colleges, that the accommodation of students in or close to their university or college,…

This article describes the development and the initial psychometric evaluation of the Social Issues Advocacy Scale in two studies. In the first study, an exploratory factor analysis (n = 278) revealed a four-factor scale, accounting for 71.4% of the variance, measuring different aspects of social issue advocacy: Political and Social Advocacy,…

The essay focuses on curriculum history as the study of systems of reason. The first section considers curriculum as "converting ordinances", inscribing Puritan notions of education as evangelizing and calculating designs in American Progressive education. The second section examines the Social Question, a cross-Atlantic Protestant reformist…

Echoing Henry Giroux's concerns for the current state of youth and education, this article seeks to provide a cultural history that focuses on the cycles of violence and non-violence happening within public education systems in North American democracies like Canada, with Ontario being the author's primary focus. More specifically, the author…

This article outlines the current problems facing vocational education in China in order to raise the question as to how deep-seated and intractable they might be. In order to address this question a historical analysis of vocational education from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of Mao's period of office is undertaken. The rise of…

Wales provides an interesting case study of the ways in which policies relating to continuing professional development (CPD) change over time. During the past three decades there has been a swing from central political influences on CPD policy to a focus on school priorities coupled with greater individual professional focus, then back again to…

This paper presents a part of the findings from a larger study undertaken to explore the experience of graduate students in education in Pakistan. Analysis of a smaller slice of data collected from students who were enrolled in the PhD and MPhil programmes of the Department of Education in a large public sector university in Northern Pakistan was…

One important hallmark of William Lowe Boyd's scholarship was his uncanny ability to identify and articulate changes in the key ideas that shape and reshape scholarly, professional, and public discussions of educational policy and politics. Whether one thinks about debates over centralization and decentralization of policy control, changes in…