Historically, research in teacher education has played a practical role deriving its questions directly either from "the doing" of teacher education and/or having sought to directly improve "the doing" of teacher education. As a result, a tendency towards moral, intellectual and institutional parochialism has confined both the…

Nativism is a forgotten ideology which nevertheless operates in the current era as illustrated by the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictionistic policies in response to growing Latino/a immigration. This response to Latino/a immigration recalls a historic era from the early 1900s known as the Americanization period which was also…

Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in an elite Chinese university and English language literature of audit culture in higher education against the backdrop of Chinese higher education in transition, this paper has discovered that Chinese higher education is undergoing an auditing process. However, this Chinese audit regime is not only guarded by a…

Informed by "critical" approaches to "educational technology", this paper aims to move away from presenting a "could" and "should" explanation of children learning with technology to a more nuanced, context-rich analyses of how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being used by technologically privileged families at home. Here, a…

Watching the rise to fame of Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor who is one of the heroes of director Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for 'Superman'," the author was struck by how the targets had changed. Clark's baseball bat was aimed at the young black males who were demonized as a criminal element in the…

Following the U.S. financial crisis of 2008, demands on our social safety nets grew as federal, state, and local revenues declined. Projected shortfalls are forcing deep cuts in state and local services including education. It is too early to know fully the nature of the cuts or impacts on various communities and constituencies. This article looks…

In the 1960s, evaluation thrived in the sunshine of political support for our work. We also experienced the dark side of the force of politics: efforts to introduce partisan biases favorable to special interests. In response to politics as contamination, at least two families of stances developed: populist and public interest. The populist stances…

Reductions in further and higher education spending, combined with cuts to helping-hand schemes such as the Education Maintenance Allowance, present a fundamental threat to everything educators stand for. This author discusses the need to build a credible alternative that puts tertiary education at the heart of a strategy for economic growth and…

Britain's universities are going through another period of reform, although in reality it might be better to describe current conditions as the latest stage of a permanent revolution that began some forty years ago. This time, however, there is a very real possibility that the new cost-cutting coalition government will inflict lasting and serious…

Using urban regime theory, the article examines two Rust Belt cities that tried to break the cycle of social reproduction in their communities by reforming their schools. The article contributes to the development of urban regime theory by comparing an "emerging" regime to an "established" regime. The comparison highlights the interdependent…

This article is based on a talk that was given by the author at the Institute of Historical Research on 3 February 2011, on the Victorian polymath Francis Galton and the malign legacy of his eugenic theories. It pays tribute to the pioneering work of the late Brian Simon in challenging the whole idea of "fixed innate intelligence" and in…

Poor social mobility has become controversial, with the stranglehold of the independent schools over elite universities intensifying during the New Labour period. The author identifies the failure of New Labour's Mark 2 A level reforms to deal with the situation, particularly the introduction of the A star at A level, which has given the…

The seventies and eighties saw the adult education movement renew and reexamine its commitment to opening up learning opportunities to "disadvantaged" groups. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) was now part of the mainstream of public policy making in lifelong learning and had a significant role in delivering…

In this paper, the author first cites passages that highlight the key developments and dilemmas of teacher education in Ghana in the 1960s, when the new nation resolved to prepare its largely untrained teaching force in "progressive" methods. Across the decade--and across subject areas--Ghana conducted in-service teacher training to…

This paper focuses on accountability in school-based education in England. It explores notions of accountability and proposes a new framework for its analysis. It then identifies a number of types of accountability which are present in school-based education, and discusses each in terms of who is accountable to whom and for what. It goes on to…