Who should be accountable for what beginning teachers need to know? This article first explains and illustrates three sets of knowledge and skills beginning teachers should have acquired in their preparation programs: academic knowledge needed for teaching the field of their license, generic professional knowledge and skills needed for teaching…

In this article, the author discusses Iowa's deference to local autonomy. Unlike most states, Iowa continues its long history of local independence by allowing districts to set their own goals. In the late 1990s, when the nation's governors and business leaders threw their weight behind the push for statewide academic standards, Iowa begged to…

China is the world's largest market for solar water heating systems, installing 13 million square meters of new systems in 2004, mostly in large cities. Municipal authorities, however, are sensitive to quality and visual impact issues created by this technology deployment. Therefore, there is currently a trend toward developing building integrated…

The policy priority of management development in the past 20 years appears to have been overshadowed since the new millennium by the goal of widening participation in learning of low-skilled and excluded groups. This change of emphasis could potentially be damaging if efforts to increase management participation in learning are relaxed, because…

The topic of professional and corporate ethics is one that is discussed frequently in the general media today. With unindicted and unconvicted ethical violators like Kenneth Lay of Enron and Richard Scrushy of Health South appearing as anathemas to those who study and attempt to incorporate ethical tenets into everyday professional life, debates…

The notion of learning styles, and the multiple intelligence theory from which some of this derives, has come to be one of the dominant themes in the discourse on learning and teaching. This article argues that much of the language associated with this recent educational phenomenon is misleading for teachers. The author argues that instead of…

This paper will concentrate on the current shift from teaching to entitlement learning that has become a significant part of our educational discourse and culture. With increasing emphasis on accountability and high test score, students have become active recipients in "assessing" and "evaluating" the effectiveness of their learning experiences.…

A discourse of marketisation prevails in recent publications on higher education in Ireland. Higher education is urged to heed the call to the markets and to become the driver of Ireland's future economic success, as Ireland seeks to build a knowledge-based economy. This article questions the dominant marketisation discourse in higher education.…

The achievement of adolescent literacy learners has become a significant topic of research and policy. This review of literature links current literacy learning theories, research that addresses the individualized nature of adolescent readers, and the literature delineating adolescent literacy policy. Researchers using naturalistic inquiry have…

"Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life" presents research findings on the effects of early childhood programs and practices in the first decade of life and their implications for policy development and reform. Leading scholars in the multidisciplinary field of human development and in early childhood learning…

Is the United States getting it wrong when it comes to educating tomorrow's innovators in critical fields? It has been known for years that the only way to compete globally in information technology, engineering, nanotechnology, robotics and other fields is to give students the best educational opportunities possible. But do individuals have a…

In U.S. K-12 public education, incentive pay for educators remains firmly fixed as a high-interest policy topic and has recently become a popular reform initiative in many school systems. The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), created in 2006 by the U.S. Department of Education, is at the forefront of this policy movement and has provided hundreds of…

The decentralization policy of Tomorrow's Schools entrusted individual schools with their own operational funds, and responsibility for property and personnel decisions and for staff development. As a result, the role of the primary principal became wider, calling on new knowledge and skills. Principals were also given a greater workload and a…

This paper discusses the failure of the University of Washington to formulate a policy regarding the establishment of a Cultural and Ethnic Diversity (CED) course requirement for undergraduates despite nine years of efforts to do so, tracing the efforts to establish a CED requirement, along with the arguments for and against such a requirement. It…

The workshop that is the subject of this report, one in a series of workshops made possible through a grant to the CFE from the National Science Foundation, is the starting point for that effort. The center's mission is to promote evidence-based policy analysis that both responds to current needs and anticipates future ones. This one-day workshop…