Advocacy for music education is a constant. Even though polls and other data continue to reveal the expressed value and importance of music education to the American public, we still must fight for our place in education. Recent state and federal laws, school district policies, learning theories, and methodologies all place arts education at the…

The Victorian Age was a period of great confusion, of great hope and great despair, of a bourgeois assault upon the aristocracy, of an evangelical assault upon the establishment, of the raised voices of the Wesleyans in the Welsh valleys. In Australia, of course it was the threat of the Yellow Peril and of Russian invasion as well as the emerging…

Using the Affiliations Unit of the University of Botswana as a case study, this paper explores how the operational milieu of an External Quality Assurance Agency (EQAA) impacts on its role and function. This milieu is described and selected frame factors are identified and evaluated, including the size of the country; the role of a hegemonic…

This paper explores how recent Labour governments have tried systematically to package educational and other social policies for media presentation and public consumption. This concern has resulted in the criticism that Labour is concerned with policy presentation above content: strong on policy spin but weak on policy delivery. The first section…

This article will focus upon the life and work of Johan Hendrik Swildens, who is widely recognized in the literature as one of the foremost spokesmen of the category of "public educators" who played a significant role in the dissemination of specific interpretations of 'constitutional enlightenment' that were endorsed by specific factions …

Legislative statutes are passed by political majorities which support structures that insulate the implementing agency from its political opponents over time. Political actors also respond to different constituencies. Depending on the broad or narrow base of these constituencies, actors favor different kinds of governance structures. We apply this…

Richard M. Nixon, the United States President in 1968 gave birth to the modern reform movement through public vouchers and other educational reform measures under his "Southern Strategy" that was designed to gain the votes of individuals who oppose school desegregation. The political activities in school desegregation after Brown by the…

This article addresses the construction of citizenship in contemporary England as a boundary between "proper" and "improper" English behavior. Through an ethnographic study of the Exodus Collective, a Rastafarian-anarchist community that was located north of London, I show that constructing citizenship also constructs…

Institutions of higher education lament the fact that policymakers have lost faith in them, particularly public higher education. One proof of such loss of faith is the substantial, steady, and sustained decline of share of public resources devoted to higher education. One unfortunate consequence of this decline in funding has been increased…

A national movement that claims its purpose is to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity is beginning to take root in several states. A state legislative panel begins investigating whether Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities are indoctrinating students in left-wing ideology. Student monitors on a campus in Colorado tell…

Foster anchors his analysis of educational leadership by situating the function of schooling as bureaucratic control over individuals. Within the context of schools as a systemic, rule-bearing institution, Foster challenges the work of educational leaders. Are educational leaders virtuous and free or are they mere agents of the state? Foster pits…

Foster's concerns with the decline of the local are examined in the context of schools' embeddedness in intersections of social, economic, and political forces of the communities in which they are located. Three readings are taken of Foster's call to explore political and economic undercurrents when viewing schools as agents of, and for,…

As part of a large-scale learning initiative, the Chinese Communist Party has declared Lushan to be a "learning mountain". There have been people learning at Lushan Mountain for 2000 years. In 1959 there was a Central Committee meeting at Lushan, where Mao Zedong purged his widely respected comrade Peng Dehuai for daring to say people…

Reporting within the administration responsible for primary and secondary schools in the Kirov region from the early 1930s to 1941 followed a script of escalating negativity in which the higher the chain of command, the more negative the assessment. School directors wrote positive quarterly and annual evaluations. District and municipal…

This critical discourse analysis focuses on neoliberal discursive representations of the community college mission. The community college's role in reproducing social inequality is explained as a neoliberal discursive project in which meanings of education are reconstituted to secure the interests of the powerful. As such, the community college…