President Bush's proposed budget would boost total education spending next year from $39.9 billion to $44.5 billion-a far cry from the $95 billion proposed by a coalition of education groups, including the National School Boards Association. NSBA also opposes Bush's emphasis on block grants, school sanctions, and vouchers. (MLH)

Two decades after two U.S. and UK studies jump-started the school-effectiveness research movement, the American Educational Research Association invited the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement to present a symposium on international developments. The six papers herein critique and assess the movement's contributions.…

The emergence of a number 2 post (chief academic officer) focused on instructional leadership brings a new dynamic to the central office-particularly those headed by nontraditional superintendents. Used in universities, the CAO title lends cache. Women can get stuck in CAO positions; a few districts are eliminating them. (MLH)

An administrator trainer/former superintendent's experience suggests that corporate governance models don't fit the reality of school governance in many districts. Elected board members define their roles differently than their business counterparts and derive little or no monetary benefit from public service. The "new breed" resemble…

A study analyzed reasons why an introductory chemistry course serves as a gatekeeper that governs enrollment at Denmark's Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University. It concluded that admission procedures and criteria, the market economy model for higher education, and curriculum structure emphasizing pure science as foundation for biological…

Examines Israel's policy of gender equality in education, discussing: social and economic forces that created the demand for equality; political processes for implementing the policy; and policy content. Data from interviews and document reviews indicate that the policy was devised to address concerns of high-tech industries and women,…

Describes how socio-politcal changes have affected civic education in Chinese Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau in the post-World War II era. Analyzes the elements of nationalistic and democratic education in the formal curriculum. (CMK)

Alberta's charter-school legislation responds to certain needs of both liberal and republican ideologies. Alberta's experiment indicates that parents are not very dissatisfied with their local schools. Few minority children are attracted, and charter performance has not been stellar. Schools are chosen for their value systems. (Contains 31…

The decade from 1987 to 1997 saw two unsuccessful attempts to reform Illinois's school finance system from a constitutional perspective. In 1997, prospective reforms will probably be limited by partisanship, revenues and anti-tax sentiment, regional antipathies, fragmentation, and pressures for property tax relief. (MLH)

Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony--not so much a theory of domination as a theory of the manufacturing of commonsense--offers a way to break into the myth of leadership as always already tied to practices of domination. His complex accounting of leadership's "necessary" relationship to the pedagogic and hegemonic constitute an…

In this article I aim to explore some philosophical issues involved in teaching religion in Cyprus and suggest some preconditions in order for this teaching to be sensitive to the multicultural character of the island and conducive to the vision of reconciliation and reunification. First, I shall clarify some particularities of the political…

Although Anglo-German relations since 1945 have by and large been friendly at the level of the political elite, on a wider scale British perceptions of Germany and the Germans are for the most part negative and still dominated by images of the Third Reich and the Second World War. It has even been suggested that "kraut-bashing" is the…

This paper examines the differential response of two rural districts of England (Fenland and Waveney) to changes in council house provisioning in the 1980s. It is situated in a decade when major policy shifts in social housing policy were occurring at the national level with local governments devising new social housing strategies in response.…

More comprehensive understanding of giftedness and talent growth will be accessible once people explore the large-scale contexts that surround and shape the development of high ability individuals. Many analyses of close-proximity contexts, such as classrooms and schools, currently enrich the gifted education literature. More in-depth explorations…

Quebec rap lyrics stand out on the world Hip-Hop scene by virtue of the ease and rapidity with which performers in this multilingual, multiethnic youth community codeswitch, frequently among three or more languages or language varieties (usually over a French and/or English base) in the same song. We construct a framework for understanding…