This paper draws on data from secondary sources and in-depth interviews to explore the question: What is the impact of policy on teaching, learning, assessment and inclusion in Adult and Community Learning (ACL) "Skills for Life" (SfL) provision? In particular, it focuses on the government's use of five policy-steering…

Many nations, including the United States, have had to make difficult decisions that often affect educational equity. This article addresses three controversial issues--parental contributions to public schools, student tracking, and testing practices--by comparing policies in South Africa, England, and China with those in the United States.

The new amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act became effective in July 2005 and contained a number of important changes to the current law. Some of the major changes regarding highly qualified teachers, alignment with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, eligibility, the Individualized Education Program process, and…

Nearly every country suffers from dynamic inequality, since certain features of virtually all societies are responsible: variation in family background; variation in the quality of schooling; sometimes sharp differences in the treatment of boys and girls, or of racial and ethnic minorities, or of urban and rural residents. In addition, many…

Education reforms have affected schools and the educators who work in them. Using state-wide survey data from 1993 and 2003, this study examines how the work of school superintendents has been affected over a ten-year period by these reform initiatives, especially increased demands for accountability. The general message from our data is that…

This study analyzes the implementation of a tuition decentralization policy in North Carolina. Concepts of organizational culture served as a guiding framework for an interpretive analysis. Qualitative case study data for the research was collected from interviews with key policy makers within the University of North Carolina as well as an…

In this article, the author gives an overview of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an international human rights convention that sets out the fundamental human rights of people with disabilities. The Convention sets out general and specific obligations for…

The decentralization of the power of school governance is one of the recent trends of educational development in a global society in which the notion of parents as stakeholders and partners of state education is being gradually recognized, albeit at different paces, in several Asian countries. This paper attempts to analyze the chronological…

Purpose: This preliminary study compared clinical evaluations for guardianship in three states with varying levels of statutory reform. Design and Methods: Case files for 298 cases of adult guardianship were reviewed in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, three states with varying degrees of statutory reform. The quality and content of the…

The aim of this article is to contribute to realising the progressive and democratic opportunities that National Qualifications Frameworks (NQFs) can offer. In doing so it will be critical of many of the ways that NQFs have been interpreted to date and the claims that have been made for them. The article has six sections. Section 1 considers some…

In this essay, Shirley M. Tilghman discusses the purpose, design, and impact of Princeton University's no-loan financial aid policy, which was enacted in 2001. As the centerpiece of an aid and recruitment strategy that seeks to improve college access despite growing socioeconomic stratification, the policy obliges Princeton to meet all student…

University and college campuses in the United States utilize disciplinary/judicial processes to help address student behavioral problems. These include administrative, majority-peer, and minority-peer processes. This descriptive research was undertaken to find which of these three discipline/judicial processes were the most effective. The…

In this article, the author comments on Peter Roos's article (this issue). The author sees a strong need to clarify whether the horse that is to be remounted is more and better English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs or the goal of promoting bilingual education as a positive practice in the nation's schools or something else altogether. If the…

The authors of the articles in this issue have provided a descriptive, analytic view of the politics of privatization, not a normative one. They have elected to view privatization more as a basic tool of government, with both uses and limitations, than strictly as an issue of ideology. Through their examination of the nexus between privatization…

The tension at the heart of pension politics is the incentive to address today's claimants and focus on the here-and-now at the expense of long-term concerns and more dispersed constituencies. In the private sector, rules and regulations seek to tame corner-cutting and short-sighted behavior. In the public sector, the primary safeguard is the…