Education policy-makers and practitioners want to know which policies and practices can best achieve their goals. But research that can inform evidence-based policy often requires complex methods to distinguish causation from accidental association. Avoiding econometric jargon and technical detail, this paper explains the main idea and intuition…

This article proposes a brief investigation of Italian interculturalism(s) as documented by scholarship, relevant policy documents and teaching textbooks, and presents some key practical issues relating to the integration of students of immigrant origin. The authors then analyse the 2008 "White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue"'s core…

This paper compares four short- and medium-term strategies available to public higher education to balance budgets in the face of major cutbacks in public funding. These strategies include: capping enrolments, changing the enrolment mix, raising prices and increasing enrolments without raising prices. The paper assesses the likely effects of these…

This paper grabs hold of the "assessment tiger" by considering the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) "Arts Report Cards" for the visual arts, which were constructed and have been administered four times within thirty-five years. Two purposes of the NAEP have persisted since its founding: (1)…

This study provides an analysis of data collected from Chihuahua, Mexico, and Ontario, Canada, educators on how United States (U. S.) policies are taught and discussed in their classrooms. Teachers and administrators were interviewed with regard to their respective curricula and classroom discussions. The researcher sought to gain insight on how…

In the context of the National Bilingual Program 2004-2019, currently called "Program for Strengthening the Development of Competencies in a Foreign Language," the Colombian government has implemented a series of actions to raise the level of English proficiency of teachers and students and insert the country into globalization…

The purpose of this study was to assess the equity and adequacy of the NYC schools through analysis of the distribution of key resources before and after its 32 decentralized community school districts were recentralized into ten administrative regions in 2003. The study used a framework for assessing adequacy based on economic, sociological, and…

The paper reports the results of a qualitative research study that explores principal, teacher, and parent perceptions with regard to Qatar's education reform, Education for a New Era (EFNE) launched in 2004. The study focuses on the effects of the reform on each group, their perceived advantages and disadvantages of the reform, and the challenges…

This paper problematizes dominant discourses of social mobility. It begins by discussing social mobility from a philosophical perspective before examining current policies on social mobility in the United Kingdom, drawing on data from both recent mobility studies and the contemporary labour market. I then broaden out the discussion by exploring…

The spectre of a food security crisis has raised important questions about future directions for agriculture and given fresh impetus to a long-standing debate about the potential contribution of agricultural biotechnology to food security. This paper considers the discursive foundations for promotion of agricultural biotechnology, arguing that…

The study of common and diverse effects in the field of education across Europe is a growing field of inquiry and research. It is the result of many actions, networks and programmes over the last few decades and the development of common European education policies. "Europeanizing Education" describes the origins of European education…

The 2012 federal Budget marks the beginning of a painful and unnecessary fiscal retrenchment. Despite boasting one of the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios amongst industrialized countries, the Conservative government is pressing ahead with deep cuts of more than $5 billion across departmental budgets by 2014-15. For post-secondary education and research,…

Despite being minority languages like many others, sign languages have traditionally remained absent from the agendas of policy makers and language planning and policies. In the past two decades, though, this situation has started to change at different paces and to different degrees in several countries. In this article, the author describes the…

Two years after the U.S. Department of Education awarded $650 million in Investing in Innovation grants, some of the winners are still facing financial uncertainty. Other grantees have also encountered problems with matching funds coming through, and some nonprofit grantees have been forced to contribute their own money to match the initial…

Comparing the papers on the Korean and the U.S. situations leads to interesting conclusions. Cho and Shin argue that the recent crisis did not create huge problems in the labor market because Korea was firstly in a fundamentally sound economic situation and secondly took adequate anti-crisis measures, in particular by stabilizing internal demand.…