The evolution of South African universities continues to be shaped by both apartheid and more recent post-apartheid policies. Yet the South African university system is mainly an elite, low participation and high attrition system, offering a medium quality education. Moreover, there is uneven attention to the opportunities that…

In this qualitative case study, we explore the political impulses behind suburban secession from the 2013 Memphis-Shelby County merger, the largest school district consolidation in recent history. Decades removed from the Civil Rights Movement, during a period of stark inequality, colorblind law and policymaking, and a diminished understanding of…

As more and more cities and states diversify the educational options available to parents and students, creating magnet, open-enrollment, small school, career and technical, charter, and private school opportunities, educational choice markets need to become a part of the regulation conversation. In this report, Mike McShane examines the…

This article offers a critique of the discursive politics represented in attempts to frame social sciences and humanities work in the mould of neoliberal knowledge capitalism. The critique offered is inspired by Foucault's critical thought on neoliberalism and an interpretation of "neoliberal governmentality" that flows from his College…

This paper aims to provide insights into recent events concerning school sex education in Japan. A campaign of criticism against school sex education emerged in 2002 at both national and regional levels, and included a court case in Tokyo. Despite leaving a depressing atmosphere regarding sex education teaching practices, this campaign also…

In this chapter, four longtime adult literacy practitioners recount their pathways into the field in the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Their stories highlight the creativity and openness that characterized literacy work in those years and point to what has been lost as the field has become dominated by the Workforce Investment Act and the…

The purpose of this article is to contribute to progressive school change by developing a more systematic critique of school effectiveness (SE) and school improvement (SI) as paradigms. Diverse examples of paradigms and paradigm change in non-educational fields are used to create a model of paradigms for application to SE and SI, and to explore…

International migration yields pervasive cross-border social engagements, yet homeland political involvements are modest to minimal. This contrast reflects the ways in which the distinctive characteristics of expatriate political life impede participation in the polity that emigrants have left behind. As polities are bounded, moving to the…

Political divides in our democracy are ever-widening. Deliberative democratic civics education provides a new way for civics education to prepare students for a democracy that addresses the diversity in moral perspectives that have created the divides in a more constructive way. Civics education traditionally has been tied to aggregative theories…

The aim of the paper is to research the important process of the history of the educational development of Estonia, the reform of the national school curriculum which began after the teacher's congress in 1987 and ended in 1996 when government approved the document. That reform was carried out in the context of thoroughgoing and dramatic…

Background/Context: Validity issues are often discussed in technical terms, but the context changes when measures enter broad public debate, and a wider range of interests come into play. Purpose: This article, part of a special section of TCR, considers the political dimensions of validity questions as raised by a keynote address and panel…

Over the last 200 years in Brazil, the notion of "public" has been established to mean the same as the notion of "state". Sergio Buarque de Holanda and, more recently, Marilena Chaui point out that the very old tradition of the appropriation of public goods by the private sector has been updated. However, the understanding of…

This investigation will discuss the emergence of an economistical perspective among the dominant approaches of organization theory in the United States since the inception of "organization studies" as an academic discipline. It maintains that Contingency theory, Resource Dependency theory, Population Ecology theory, and Transaction Cost theory…

This article outlines some of the policy issues currently faced by research-based universities in the Netherlands. The focus is on four leading universities (University of Amsterdam: UvA; Free University of Amsterdam: VU; Leiden University; and Delft University of Technology: TUD). The author visited these institutions as part of a Study Tour…

Transformational learning is a process resulting in deep and significant change in habitual patterns of identity, thought, emotion, and action, enabling new approaches to role enactment. This article explores how moving from a framework of dilemmas, which require solutions and one-sided choices, to a framework of paradoxes that embraces tensions…