This is a powerful critique of two decades of educational reform in New Zealand, from an educator who was deeply involved. It is also a provocative call for action. Bali Haque has been both a secondary school principal required to implement reform and a senior public servant in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) tasked with pushing…

Many school districts offer alternative education programs for their students who do not succeed in the regular classroom. At the high school level, many of these programs are separated from the regular schools. It seemed that many districts were establishing alternative education programs, but there were differences in the types of programs that…

The common reporting of effect sizes has been an important advance in education research in recent years. However, the benchmarks used to interpret the size of these effects--as small, medium, and large--do little to inform educational administration and policy making because they do not account for program costs. The author proposes an approach…

Children may enter group care at very young ages. Developmentally, newborns (from birth to 4 months old) offer unique opportunities and challenges for child care providers. Are child care programs ready? Little information is available on providing group care to children at this critical developmental stage. This article explores the challenges of…

Public engagement is increasingly advocated and applied in the development and implementation of technological innovations. However, initiatives so far are rarely considered effective. There is a need for more methodological rigor and insight into conducive conditions. The authors developed an evaluative framework and assessed accordingly the…

Canada's provincial and territorial governments are committed to implement the Labour Mobility chapter of the "Agreement on Internal Trade" (AIT) in 2009. This article examines the implications of this agreement for teacher certification and teacher education programs. It argues that the full impact of AIT will not be immediately…

The processes of globalization have demanded that emergent countries include issues of diversity into their political, economic and educational agendas. Consequently, educational institutions have started, in order to ascribe to requests made by transnational organizations (UNESCO, the World Bank and OECD), to include diversity as a priority to…

This paper focuses on the World Bank/IMF (International Monetary Fund), the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and the WTO (World Trade Organisation) as institutions of transnational policy making. They are all at present making education policies which are decisively shaping current directions and developments in…

In this paper, I will consider the lessons that can be learnt about literacy policy and its role in large-scale education reform programmes, with particular reference to policy-making in England since the election of New Labour in 1997. New Labour's promise to the electorate in 1997 was that state-funded education could be fixed and turned into a…

In this article, the authors present a "telling case" of the history of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group (SBCDG) and describe how policies supported and constrained the work of this sustaining community. As a telling case, this discussion of policy issues that were constructed and faced by members of the SBCDG does not claim…

This article explores the nature of participatory practices in policy-making in basic education and their impact on the directions and outcomes of policy. Drawing on theoretical developments in policy studies, the focus is on non-formal education as a policy challenge for EFA. Data are presented from a recent field study undertaken in Uganda of…

Employing the Advocacy Coalition Framework to ground the analysis, this article begins with an historical overview of the US Protestant Right and its involvement with the politics of public schooling. It then moves to a discussion of a few current legal and policy issues (intelligent design, evolution, the Kansas state board of education, school…

This paper explores the role of the Canadian federal government in two foreign policy areas: overseas development assistance and international cultural relations by providing a brief history of the federal government's engagement in both policy areas and highlighting the contributions and challenges of Canadian foreign policy to the…

Historically, education policy making has been interwoven with the nation-building project. However, the centrality of the nation state in education policy making has been constrained by a wide range of new socio-political and economic phenomena that relate to European integration. This article explores the ways in which European education…

Public organizations charged with coordinating higher education institutions face a complex set of tasks. Whether coordinating institutions within one sector or across sectors, such organizations play vital roles in promoting a state's capacity for policy leadership to meet the growing need for an educated citizenry. National experts have…