Competition between schools combined with test-based accountability to hold schools accountable for predetermined knowledge standards have become a common solution in educational change efforts to improve the performance of educational systems around the world. This is happening as family and community social capital declines in most parts of…

The adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 and its ratification by the UK government two years later came at a time of considerable progress in youth justice. The Convention itself set clear standards of treatment, in terms of both processes and disposals, which appeared at the time to provide positive…

Ontario, Canada's new character education policy is analyzed to determine how it supports and undermines critical democratic commitments to diversity, dialogue, equity, critical mindedness, and social justice. While policies are always open to interpretation, recent reform policies requiring evidence of continual improvement in students' academic…

This essay traces the roots of the equity approach to school choice to the work of Coons & Sugarman, which began as an outgrowth of their involvement with the landmark California school finance case, "Serrano v. Priest" (1971). Comparing the equity approach to the market model espoused by Milton Friedman, the author argues that the former is…

The weightings of the four component indicators of the UNDP's Human Development Index HDI appear to be arbitrary and have not been given justification. This paper develops a variant of the HDI, calculated to reflect peoples' revealed evaluations of education and the productivity of work. The resulting Calibrated human Development Index CDI has a…

Federal, state, and local policy makers' high-stakes standards-based accountability reforms are transforming the early childhood teacher education process. These reforms affect how early education teacher candidates figure their role as teachers. By employing Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain's conception of figured worlds to analyze the…

Changes in education systems across Europe are a response to perceived needs to improve academic performance. The recent workforce remodelling agenda in England (2003-2005) reflected a growing concern that centralisation and the associated deskilling of teachers had gone too far. The resultant restructuring of the work of teachers, giving roles…

The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to publish high school graduation rates for public schools; the U.S. Department of Education is currently considering a mandate to standardize high school graduation rate reporting. However, no consensus exists among researchers or policymakers about how to measure high school graduation rates. We use…

Evaluating the impacts of public school funding on student achievement has been an important objective for informing education policymaking but fraught with data and methodological limitations. Findings from prior research have been mixed at best, leaving policymakers with little advice about the benefits of allocating public resources to schools…

The 2004 Higher Education Act introduced variable tuition fees of up to 3,000 British Pounds for full-time undergraduates in England. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) charging the maximum tuition must give low-income students bursaries of 300 British Pounds. On top of this mandatory minimum, HEIs now provide additional discretionary financial…

We bring together education research on factors shaping teacher learning with institutional research on policy shifts and conflicts to explore an instructional policy shift in one school district. Specifically, we compare mathematics teacher learning opportunities in three elementary schools over a three-year period during which a district policy…

This study focuses on the Soviet introduction of local studies to Ukrainian schools during the 1920s. It argues that, through their efforts at pedagogical reform, educational planners sought a fundamental re-imagining of place. The Ukrainian Commissariat of Education asked teachers and their students to engage the "productive" world…

Based on a fieldwork study, this article seeks to investigate the implementation of "thematic curriculum" in Uganda from the perspectives of teachers. The article shows that although the majority of teachers are enthusiastic about the new curriculum, their implementation efforts are constrained by a multitude of challenges. The findings…

As coeditor of the April 2006 issue of this journal, Tara Star Johnson wrote an eloquent essay in which she explored "the increasing bureaucratic pressure to mass-produce, homogenize and monitor students" as manifested in the No Child Left Behind Act and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) accreditation…

This article reports that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has penalized fewer teams than it expected this year over athletes' poor academic performance. For years, officials with the NCAA have predicted that strikingly high numbers of college sports teams could be at risk of losing scholarships this year because of their…