President Obama has committed himself to "reform America's public schools," and his administration is focused on making early childhood programs, common standards, charter schools and teachers more effective. However, writes Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, the administration should also undertake actions to better integrate…

Purpose/Objectives: The Reauthorization Act of 2004 requires schools participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs to establish a wellness policy. The purpose of this study was to examine school foodservice directors' attitudes about the potential benefits of the wellness policy. Methods: A survey research design was…

The Bright Futures Scholarship (BFS), Florida's lottery-funded, merit-based scholarship program, has been a source of both praise and criticism since its 1997 inception. Proponents of the scholarship assert the program has achieved the desired goals of making college more affordable for state residents and encouraging the brightest students to…

State control over higher education has been provided for in the Brazilian legal system since the establishment of the republic, with university autonomy having been the object of six reforms of higher education and various federal decrees up until the federal constitution of 1988, which upheld it in Article 207. In a country with a limited and…

The recent restructuring of higher education in Japan has been carried out in the context of neo-liberalism with an emphasis on the unbridled workings of market forces. However, civic discourse on issues such as active citizenship and social inclusion/exclusion, which is significant to higher education as a democratic public sphere, has been left…

In the post-Mao era, the Chinese government carried out a series of education reforms to modernise education provision. This paper explores two related aspects of these reforms through comparative case study research in three different school locations within the same region in China. The first focus is upon system reform initiated through…

This paper concerns higher and further education institutions' policies as they relate to the interactions of their staff and students with the sex industry. In Scotland and England, consenting adults may legally buy and sell sex and commercial sexual entertainment, such as erotic dance and phone sex, provided that they do not do so in a public…

No Child left Behind (NCLB), now being considered for reauthorization, may be one of the most significant education policies ever enacted by the federal government. The purpose of this inquiry was to understand the lived experiences of K-3 teachers since NCLB was signed into law in 2002. The data source was focus group interviews with 39 K-3…

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the author was falsely labeled as a student with mental retardation, a label that controlled her educational experience for 8 years. In the early 1980s, she completed traditional university licensure programs to become both a general and a special education teacher. In this article, the author provides the perspective…

Logical analyses of legislative texts show that the root cause for the huge controversy elicited by the issue of reasonable returns for China's privately run schools lies in the fact that legislators have confused public benefit versus non-public benefit and profit making versus non-profit making, concepts that pertain, respectively, to two…

Since World War II, the internationalization of education has experienced a change from a period of political influence to a service trade structure. As the Third International Forum on the Educational Service Trade began, more and more governments accepted the concept of cross-border education. At a time when both opportunities and challenges lay…

We report on the 2008 study by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) on teacher retention and attrition in South African public schools, with a focus on North-West Province. Data from the study show that some teachers prefer to leave the teaching profession for promotion posts in non-teaching areas within the education sector, while others…

This paper reviews school inspection systems in small states and territories (SSTs), indicating tensions, challenges and sensitivities that relate to their small size. A qualitative case study is presented of the new school inspection system in Macau, a post-colonial, small territory facing issues experienced in other SSTs. Macau's inspection…

In 1974, when a successful revolution had overthrown a dictatorial regime, Portugal had an elite higher education system with low participation rates. In the decades following the revolution, the state developed policies aimed at increasing student participation to European levels. However, higher education policies have been through frequent…

The increasing integration of national educational systems, in particular in Europe, is giving rise to conflict among traditional forms of instruction, curricula, pedagogical norms and values, and firmly established standards of education. The center of this conflict now, which was catalyzed by Russia's joining the Bologna process, consists of the…