This article discusses Iraq's Ministry of Education's freedom to call the shots a year after a U.S. led coalition took charge of rebuilding their school system. The U.S. Agency for International Development has rejected requests by the press for the monitoring and evaluation documents on Creative Associates International. The Coalition Provisional…

This article reports how the Voyager Universal Literacy core program, which is sailing successively into the market for reading programs, has been the target of several speculations over its secrets of success. Use of the Voyager Universal Literacy program has since spread to 1,000 districts throughout the country since its introduction into the…

In 2002, the Scottish Executive Education Department launched a national debate on schools for the 21st century. The debate elicited over 1500 responses and it is estimated that 20,000 people took part. This paper describes the main themes arising from the debate, highlighting the support for comprehensive education and the high level of trust in…

The U.S. Department of Education's Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention publishes "Catalyst," a newsletter covering current Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence (AODV) prevention issues at institutions of higher education. "Catalyst" discusses emerging issues and highlights innovative efforts on…

Project TRREE (Teacher Recruitment and Retention for Educational Excellence) is a three-year, federally funded project conducted by the Kentucky Department of Education. The purpose of the project is to develop a systemic approach to increase the number of highly qualified special education teachers with a focus on recruitment of linguistically,…

This article offers a critique of what has become known as "inclusive education" under the New Labour administration. The initial impetus for the article was a research project designed to ascertain the impact of the "presumption of mainstreaming" contained in Section 15 of the "Standards in Scotland's Schools etc. Act…

This article explores policy and curriculum diffusion in southern and eastern Africa through an examination of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and outcomes-based education. The article argues that the NQF was adopted for different reasons in different contexts, but that discourse coalitions and conferences have been critical in…

The place of economics in the curriculum in England and Wales provides a lens through which we may view the ways in which the curriculum as a whole is fought over and remains shifting terrain. Conceived of as social movements, school subject communities are made up of competing factions giving rise to contest and conflict both within themselves…

I take up recent remarks by Teruhisa Horio about school student disaffection in Japan and see echoes of this in Britain. In that country the traditional school curriculum of discrete largely academic subjects is often taken to be one cause of the problem. I review justifications for it but no sound ones appear to be available. We need to…

This paper examines the development of educational theory in Japan from 1945 to the present in five time divisions: (1) postwar "new education" and its critics (1945-52); (2) revisionist educational policy versus the people's education movement (1952-61); (3) the formation of "postwar pedagogy" as a self-reflection of the…

Public schooling has been kidnapped. The author examines how this happened--since we all know very well who did it. How did public schooling become a hostage of world's neo-rightist political processes? This article attempts to unveil some of those strategies that underpin the very core of the neo-rightist current triumphalistic posture. To…

Music education does not exist independently, but is influenced by changes in society. Music educators must be responsive to those influences. By relating music education to political, economic, social, cultural and educational developments in the Republic of Korea during the period from 1945 to 2005, this article aims to put that education in a…

Since becoming president of the Alliance for Excellent Education in February 2005, the author has learned a great deal about the vital role that high-quality literacy research plays in improving teaching. Education researchers know how critical it is that they serve the needs of educators. As a former governor of West Virginia and member of the…

In 2006 Vietnam had experienced more than two decades of reform. However, while the reforms have transformed the entire Vietnamese economy and opened the country to globalization, the education system is still very much under the Vietnamese Communist Party's control. The schoolbooks are published under close supervision of the authorities. The…

On October 6, 1957, most Americans had concluded that Sputnik, a manmade satellite that the Russians had sent into orbit, was not a hoax nor an electronic Potemkin Village, a product of what is called today as "special effects." Initially, the idea that Russian technology could surpass the American's was unthinkable. And the brains'…