It can be argued that nearly thirty years of heavily centralised intervention into English pedagogy, curriculum and assessment have had a deprofessionalising effect on teachers. The accountability stranglehold means it is safer for English teachers to implement accepted strategies that are perceived to enable pupils to negotiate assessment…

This paper has investigated the way the dissertation writing component of MA TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) programmes in Iran has changed over the past decade in relation to globalization. The data, collected from 40 questionnaires completed by Iranian academic staff teaching these programmes, suggest that while change in…

This article reveals three emerging areas of conflict in the use of educational assessment instruments in compulsory education in Switzerland and outlines an analytical approach for detecting and analysing these areas of conflict. The approach combines a conceptual perspective, an evaluation perspective and a teaching perspective to show the…

There is no doubt about the necessity for the inclusion and the integration of minority groups in German school system. Although there are different recognised politics and developments within the school policy of the 16 federal states in Germany, there are also common important political issues. While heterogeneity in minority groups is…

In 2013, the Boston Public Schools (BPS) adopted the Home-Based Student Assignment Policy (HBSAP), which replaced elementary and middle-school choice within three large geographic zones with an algorithm that generates a choice basket of schools for each address based on proximity to the student's home and a guarantee that all baskets will include…

Our research is driven by a strong belief that the stories of young people gathered through ethnographic interviews can generate awareness not only of the complexities, uncertainties and possibilities of young people's lives but also the ways in which their identities and life chances are shaped by broader structural, institutional and historical…

This report investigates factors relevant to choosing locations conducive to both attainment and maintenance of a teaching career. In addition to salary and cost of living, the investigators compiled and ranked variables related to family, such as parental income and education, and differences in political structures that affect careers in…

This volume revisits the book edited by David Phillips and Michael Kaser in 1992, entitled "Education and Economic Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union" (https://doi-org.bibliotheek.ehb.be/10.15730/books.42). Two and a half decades later, this volume reflects on how post-socialist countries have engaged with what Phillips and Kaser called…

All states value their distinct approaches to policy and to life and the U.S. Constitution embeds the idea of state rights and responsibilities as a core principle in the federal system. California arguably takes this further than most. This paper provides a new way to think about how national policies might complicate or augment the next state…

This paper focuses on the dynamics that animate the situation of women inside academia and the social world of science. Based on a long-term ethnographic study we chose specific cases (scientists educated in Poland) to illustrate the complexity of the career-making process in the 21st century. In this country, in a social and professional…

This case describes how a newly appointed superintendent implemented systematic changes across the school district to increase academic performance and keep schools open and operational. The district superintendent and leadership team were forced by the state educational system to promote rapid and drastic organizational and academic changes to…

Purpose: This article addresses the broad context of community college accreditation which surrounds a controversy involving one of the largest community colleges in the United States, City College of San Francisco (CCSF), and its regional accrediting agency, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC). Its purposes are to…

Despite the achievement of key civil rights milestones, as well as growing public awareness and concern, educational inequities for students of color and other historically marginalized students continue to persist throughout the U.S. educational system (Aud, Fox, & KewalRamani, 2010). The pursuit of educational equity has often been achieved…

Taking the evolution of the quality agenda in the UK as its centrepiece, this article analyses the politics of legitimation accompanying the emergence of quality assurance and the contribution of quality enhancement to the power play therein. This article argues that over the last 25 years the quality agenda has been used as a proxy--a state…

Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates' promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century (e.g. "Brown v. Board," "Lau v. Nichols") and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement…