As states scramble to spend and report on millions of dollars of education stimulus funds already flowing their way, they face another daunting task if they want a shot at even more money: navigating the complex application process for $4 billion from the Race to the Top Fund. Merely filling out the award application will take each state 642…

This chapter considers the design of incentive pay systems for teachers and principals and the challenges facing policy makers who seek to design them. The author argues that policy makers must direct the efforts of teachers and principals toward schools' mission--the acquisition of skills and knowledge among children--and must find ways to link…

Background: Coaches and physical educators must obtain valid data relating to the contribution of each of their players in order to assess their level of performance in team sport competition. This information must also be collected and used in real game situations to be more valid. Developed initially for a physical education class context, the…

Innovation is crucial to the competitiveness of the economies of Europe, and learning is crucial to innovation. The most important trend shift is not that knowledge is becoming more important but that it is becoming obsolete more rapidly than before, so that firms and employees constantly have to learn and acquire new competencies. This involves…

Supporters of public education fear attempts to privatize schools, while the private sector has always struggled against the monopolistic power of the public schools that educates almost 90% of all K-12 students. This trepidation has recently been intensified by the creation of a "third sector" that includes charter schools, voucher…

Globalisation, together with readier access to capability-enhancing technologies and to technological insights once restricted to a few leading economies, are resulting in greater competition within Europe, and more widely within the developed world, for influence of all kinds (not just influence over the choices that foreign students make about…

The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998 (Perkins III) has been reauthorized in the first session of the 109th Congress, but not without strong opposition from the Bush Administration and allied neoconservative school reformers. This paper will detail four neoconservative rationales--modernization, competition, alignment,…

Since the 1980s, "key school system" (KSS) in basic education has contributed to teaching quality and the development of some schools. However, at the same time it brings about many serious problems such as failure to attain educational objective, being away from the goal of education equity, arising students' mental or emotional…

This paper describes a modification of a popular TV game show, "American Idol[R]," conducted in an undergraduate calculus course. The focal point of this game show is to get students to interact in competitive self-assessment. Student competition is an effective device to engage students in the learning process. Placing students in the role of…

The Olympiad movement has a long history in Estonia, and the national system developed several decades ago. The first Olympiad for gifted and talented students was held in mathematics in 1950. Now there are more than 20 different fields of competition for basic school and gymnasium students. In 2005/2006, Estonian teams participated in 18…

This article reviews evidence from four international student achievement tests on the effects on student performance of competition from privately managed schools, schools' freedom to make autonomous decisions, and accountability introduced by external exit exams. The multivariate cross-country regressions are performed at the level of individual…

The traditional way for parents to determine which public school their children will attend is as simple as looking at a map. But in some cases, what is the right campus from the perspective of school district planners is not the one desired by students or their parents. As school systems have embraced education reforms in recent years, some…

This article reports on a psychometric study examining the validity and reliability of the My Class Inventory-Short Form for Teachers, an accountability measure for elementary school counselors to use as they evaluate aspects of their school counseling programs. As a companion inventory to the student version of the My Class Inventory-Short Form…

Hungary's higher education system is being transformed fundamentally for a second time after the regime change in 1989-90. The first Higher Education Act was passed in 1993. An entirely new law issued in December 2005 involved fundamental changes in the entire higher education system. The most sweeping change was the introduction of the two-cycle…

This paper describes the District of Columbia's progress in implementing a comprehensive and coherent approach to education reform from the time of application through June 30, 2011. In particular, this report highlights key accomplishments over the reporting period in the four reform areas: standards and assessments, data systems to support…