Policy "alternatives" begin as general ideas, and are inherently distinct from an innovation or reform that has been adopted by policy makers in a specific context in order to serve particular purposes. However, the interplay between the idea itself and that moment in time when it is adopted has often not been fully understood. In this article,…

In this article, the author discusses that the ability to clearly link resources, activities and goals in a rational and logical manner is a model that many educators and school leaders would welcome. She also states that in the 1990s, when the state moved in the direction of standards and accountability, part of the thinking was that public…

This article examines the impact of social research on education policy and reform in the Philippines. It begins with a brief description of the key issues in Philippine education followed by analysis of three major studies conducted in the late 1990s that made specific policy recommendations on responses to inadequate quality of the Philippine…

In this article, the author discusses the nightmare educators face due to the No Child Left Behind Act meaning of "highly qualified" teachers. But for NCLB, highly qualified doesn't necessarily mean good, for them it means the teacher took the right number of subject-area courses in college and is teaching only those subjects. And that,…

In this article, the author argues that the provisions in the White Paper and the Education and Inspections Bill mean the end of a coherent system of state education, locally administered. The education proposals are clearly part of the Government's ongoing transformation of the public sector. It is argued that the Government's education agenda is…

In January 2002, Republican President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The most conservative congressional Republicans, who opposed the bill's extensive new testing mandates and absence of school voucher provisions, were largely left out in…

The issue of college politics faced by the minority students like the Hispanics in the University of California, Los Angeles, is described. One of the students from the minority narrates two incidents in his personal life that forced him to better define himself.

This article begins by reviewing the author's work on the social construction and representation of school failure as student disability an on the reconstruction of special education and public education to avoid the need for such representations. In the remaining sections, he identifies several trends in education and society and, by linking…

The expansion of high-stakes accountability in the past decades has created an unavoidable tension with contemporary efforts to promote multicultural curricula. Accountability requires that states establish common standards, a difficult task when there is disagreement about what content students should learn. Policy makers can adopt an…

This article takes the case of the South African curriculum to examine the role of national politics and power relationships in giving internationally borrowed ideas their meaning and shape. It discusses the circulation of ideas between global, national and regional levels. In exploring the particular dynamics shaping the South African curriculum,…

The electoral victory of Lu?s In?cio "Lula" da Silva in the presidential elections of 2002 epitomized two decades of social and political transformations in Brazil. Nevertheless, instead of launching an alternative mode of doing politics, the program of the Workers' Party affirmed a state logic with a view to gradually updating the…

Despite the premise that charter schools are to be given flexibility in return for being held accountable for their results, few charter schools have actually been closed because of poor academic performance. The author sees the problem as a political one: the differing stakes between charter school families and members of the broader community.…

Overall the past decade has not been kind to educational research. First, some "research" has been subordinated to and corrupted by ideology. Second, there has been substantial questioning of what educational research should be and a fear that the federal government is moving to a rigid orthodoxy in defining what counts as…

Exploring memorial ceremonies conducted in Israeli schools over the past decade, this paper discusses the school memorial ceremony as a potential site for struggle over national identities, and schools as the social arena of an encounter between the State and civil society. Analysis of 50 ethnographies (elicited from semi-structured observations)…

This article uses the notion of resistance as an analytical tool, emphasizing its sociopolitical significance and multidimensionality, to understand the complex link between ways of being Malay, Chinese and Indian schoolgirls, schooling and the wider Malaysian society. The macro and micro dynamics of the Malaysian ethnoscape, namely the ethnic…