Under the policy umbrella of the Bologna Process, European Universities are being steered towards uniformity in terms of their institutional missions and academic curricula. Romania, as a new member of the European Community, feels such supra-national policy pressures for "reform" in its higher education sector most keenly. As a result,…

PL 94-142 fundamentally changed the lives of children with disabilities, families, and professionals. The policy opened school doors for all children, regardless of the type or degree of their disability. This article examines the policy in its historical context with a framework grounded in social sciences. The historical analysis is helpful in…

When surveys of faculty tell everyone that politically right-of-center voices are now much reduced or even in certain areas largely absent, people can be sure that the academy is damaged in at least one respect: the campus political and social climate will be unrealistic. Programs where this is central, such as political science and sociology,…

In this article, the authors argue that those who consider schools in an instrumentalist way alone are clearly deceived by the problem, whether elegantly or not. This position is dangerous and leads to a continuing dismal plight if one expects that educators should work within the confines of conditions as they presently exist, conditions that…

When Congress killed the immigration bill recently, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act was one casualty as a component of that bill. The DREAM Act is needed to allow the 65,000 American-raised, but undocumented students that graduate from high school each year to apply for conditional residence status. These…

In recent years sub-Saharan African states, including Malawi, have adopted the Education for All (EFA) goal of universal, fee-free primary education (UPE). The EFA process is often linked to the expansion and sustainability of universal rights, democratic processes, and political systems. The EFA policies have also been tied, discursively and in…

To understand the role of the media in schooling and school reform, it is necessary to examine how the media collude in the construction of the political spectacle, which Edelman (1988) called a meaning machine of alternative realities. The media uses spectacle to generate points of view, perceptions, anxieties, aspirations, and strategies to…

This article traces the construction of the educational dimension of the global development agenda over the period 1990 to 2006. It argues that the multilateral agencies, and notably the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO and UNDP, played vital roles in designing the architecture of this world agenda, supported at a key stage by the Development Assistance…

The Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, told "Time" magazine recently that America is in "an economic war" with the world and "the importance of investing in long-term research for winning that war hasn't been understood". This article argues that such comments are not just…

Policy-makers in the UK and Europe have become concerned with the successful management of transitions in learning as a means of increasing the competitiveness of their economies. Transitions relating to informal as well as formal learning have also been an important focus for the sociology of education. In this paper, I review alternative ways in…

Congressman George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts introduced a bill "to establish a system of national education" on February 25, 1870. This bill, and others that followed, opened an acrimonious political debate that lasted for twenty years. The opening salvos of that debate, and the regional issues of ethnicity and religion that framed…

Many students occupy a minimal space between the profession of composition studies and larger social and institutional constructions of composition, writing, and literacy. For most people outside the field, writing is viewed as a set of skills, rather than a substantive area of study. If students would only learn the rules--and if composition…

If leadership education programs are improving, then why do some American graduates fail in leading schools and districts even as others succeed? As one way to answer this question, this study explores the preparation, careers, and success or failure of two superintendents prepared in top tier university leadership preparation doctoral programs.…

In the summer of 1925, national attention focused on Dayton, Tennessee, where John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching evolution in violation of state law. The Tennessee "monkey trial" symbolized the confrontation of modern, secular, urban America with conservative, religious, rural America. Although urban journalists and social critics…

This anthology includes research and reviews about social issues and inequalities facing Chicanos and Chicanas and their struggle for equal participation in society. Four sections focus on demography and on economic inequality among beginning and mature workers; the Chicano family and its responses to acculturation and poverty; the Chicano…