One of the most radical actions one can take is to describe, without exaggeration or bias, exactly what is happening. The author has been reading the "Handbook for the inspection of further education and skills from September 2009." The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills' (Ofsted's) new handbook promises a "fresh…

Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these "teacher value-added" measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added…

Part of the national system of grandes Ecoles, French Business schools have known radical changes since the 1980s, notably in size, and have become more attractive to students both at a national and an international level. As a consequence, the French elitist system has been questioned by the competition of foreign--especially Anglo-Saxon--models.…

This article addresses accountability issues that affect music education policy and implementation in the neoliberal education system. Using examples from education reform in Ontario, Canada, the author argues that two forms of accountability imbalances fostered by the neoliberal state--hierarchical answerability over communicative reason and…

General equilibrium models now play important roles in many fields of economics including tax policy, environmental regulation, international trade, and economic development. The intermediate microeconomics classroom has not kept pace with these trends, however. Microeconomics textbooks primarily focus on the insights that can be drawn from the…

Special educational policymaking is a discursive struggle, a power/knowledge interplay constituted within a realm of contradictory beliefs, values and discourses that frame the context within which the education of disabled children is envisioned and realised. The prevalent policy landscapes are precarious and ever-changing, as different…

President Obama announced a plan to spend an unprecedented $12-billion over 10 years to improve programs, courses, and facilities at community colleges. The money, the president said, will position two-year institutions to produce five million more graduates over the next decade and to play a leading role in rebuilding the economy. But after the…

The methodological question concerns constructing a cardinal social index, in order to assess performances of social agents, taking into account implicit political judgments. Based on the formal structure of a Choquet's expected utility, index construction demands quantification of levels of a meaningful ordinal indicator of overall performance.…

While there is a growing body of work that considers the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) for rural schools, literature that critically examines the policy itself is lacking in rural educational research. This critical policy analysis focuses on the highly qualified teacher provision of NCLB as it relates to rural schools. The…

In 2005, the School Leadership Society, later renamed the British Columbia Educational Leadership Council (BCELC), was launched with the assistance of the British Columbia Ministry of Education to transform the goals and objectives of educational leadership and management in the Province of British Columbia (BC), Canada. In this paper the authors…

In this short discussion article I develop some earlier writing on the theme of education, improvement and sustainability (see references). It builds upon my primary criticism of the school improvement movement that it is accustomed to thinking of education as good in and of itself. As David Orr suggests candidly in his essay in the early 1990s,…

Schools, colleges, and departments of education across America currently are investigating how preservice teachers are being prepared to use technology in the classroom. Technologies available in education have evolved but technological literacy for teachers has not always kept pace. Research suggested the need for continued development and study…

"Mixed-sector" institutions are relatively new in Australia, but numbers are likely to increase as the boundaries between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education become increasingly blurred. In 2009 the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) published research examining the nature of higher…

The dissertation examines the historical development of surveillance, electronic surveillance, and cyber-surveillance from colonial times in the United States to the present. It presents the surveillance laws, technologies and policies as a balance between national security and privacy. To examine more recent developments, the dissertation…

How can schools respond to the call to equip all students with the math skills required in college and the workforce when students are working at widely varying skill levels? Offering extended instructional time in algebra, or double-dose instruction, offers one potential solution to this dilemma and has become an increasingly popular approach for…