In this article, the author discusses Iowa's deference to local autonomy. Unlike most states, Iowa continues its long history of local independence by allowing districts to set their own goals. In the late 1990s, when the nation's governors and business leaders threw their weight behind the push for statewide academic standards, Iowa begged to…

Decades following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), issues regarding the effects of skin color, poverty, and racial differences in the availability of protective factors persist. For a multiethnic sample of mainly African American (56%), female (69%), and high-achieving (65%) youths, a dual-axis model of vulnerability is used to compare four…

China is the world's largest market for solar water heating systems, installing 13 million square meters of new systems in 2004, mostly in large cities. Municipal authorities, however, are sensitive to quality and visual impact issues created by this technology deployment. Therefore, there is currently a trend toward developing building integrated…

The policy priority of management development in the past 20 years appears to have been overshadowed since the new millennium by the goal of widening participation in learning of low-skilled and excluded groups. This change of emphasis could potentially be damaging if efforts to increase management participation in learning are relaxed, because…

This article deals with a particular "best practice" in Mongolia (boarding schools) that neither traveled elsewhere nor was rescued from the socialist past and adopted in the post-socialist present. The boarding schools accommodating children from nomadic herder families have experienced a long decade (1991-2003) of neglect. The boarding…

The topic of professional and corporate ethics is one that is discussed frequently in the general media today. With unindicted and unconvicted ethical violators like Kenneth Lay of Enron and Richard Scrushy of Health South appearing as anathemas to those who study and attempt to incorporate ethical tenets into everyday professional life, debates…

There is a call for ensuring that all students learn, echoed through the national standards and other reform documents. But how serious is the focus on equity in these standards? We reviewed the standards from three major national standards movements focusing on developing standards for experienced teachers (NBPTS), preservice teachers (NCATE),…

In industrialised Western nations generally, and European Union (EU) nations particularly, immigration is an issue of considerable concern and debate. In the EU, however, discussion of immigration has tended to centre on a number of policy issues, from reliance on welfare provision, to labour force participation, to healthcare provision, to…

The notion of learning styles, and the multiple intelligence theory from which some of this derives, has come to be one of the dominant themes in the discourse on learning and teaching. This article argues that much of the language associated with this recent educational phenomenon is misleading for teachers. The author argues that instead of…

Since devolution in the UK in 1999, many aspects of social policy in Wales have been developed to respond more distinctively to the needs and requirements of those who live and work in Wales. In education and life-long learning, the Welsh Assembly Government has set out intended policy developments for the first ten years of devolved government in…

There is a general conviction in the People's Republic of China that vocational education is key to improving economic development and thereby increasing the competitiveness of the nation. During the period of economic transformation at the beginning of a new century, as the state moves from a command economy to one more responsive and…

This paper will concentrate on the current shift from teaching to entitlement learning that has become a significant part of our educational discourse and culture. With increasing emphasis on accountability and high test score, students have become active recipients in "assessing" and "evaluating" the effectiveness of their learning experiences.…

This analysis examines the relationship between federal public investment spending and economic development in the special case of Appalachia. We propose that the effects of federal public investment spending on economic development operate indirectly through private capital accumulation. We use a spatial lag regression model to test our ideas for…

The British Labour Party has continued to make progress on education, following two broad policy paths and adopting a pragmatic approach that does not attempt to force these to cross or converge. One path is that of the quasi market inherited from the previous Conservative administration; the other is characterised as "intervention" to…

A discourse of marketisation prevails in recent publications on higher education in Ireland. Higher education is urged to heed the call to the markets and to become the driver of Ireland's future economic success, as Ireland seeks to build a knowledge-based economy. This article questions the dominant marketisation discourse in higher education.…