The last quarter century saw a restructuring of employment, production and trade and a dramatic decline in union membership and density levels. There are many explanations for this, including the hostile industrial relations framework imposed by many governments, but there have been other factors such as the growth of new non-unionized industries…

This paper examines a rare response by Ofsted to academics' concerns about a prevailing compliance model of Citizenship in secondary schools. Ofsted's defence of a non-compliance model is then tested against a small sample of Ofsted inspection data. The limited evidence suggests that Ofsted's defence is undermined by the adoption of an…

Educational disadvantage is an essentially contested, political concept. At the same time there is a "phoney consensus" surrounding the issue, i.e., policy debates on the topic often fail to reflect this contestation. This lack of awareness of the political context to the debate is evident in relation to the targets and measures set for…

This article does not follow the widespread assumption or even conviction that the Bologna process is the most important reform of higher education in Europe in modern times. Instead it analyses the Bologna process in the context of previous and ongoing programmes, measures and activities by European bodies and national governments aiming at…

This article restates the needs for a comprehensive system of education to be intolerant of "ability"-thinking, and wonders why so few government ministers are prepared to reveal the type of school to which they send their children.

The author reports on a review of state policies by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, which raises questions about the validity of the use of home-language surveys as a step to identify students eligible for special help in learning English. While it's ubiquitous in schools across the country, the practice of educators'…

This paper studies the incidence and consequences of the mismatch between formal education and the educational requirements of jobs in Estonia during the years 1997-2003. We find large wage penalties associated with the phenomenon of educational mismatch. Moreover, the incidence and wage penalty of mismatches increase with age. This suggests that…

The College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia) found itself at a crossroads in 2005. Their long-popular president Timothy J. Sullivan was retiring after 13 years at the helm of the world's second oldest institution of higher education (Petkofsky, 2004). Long known as a bastion of conservatism, William and Mary could now change their…

The author has explored the pedagogical possibilities of exploring doubt and ambiguity in graduate seminars in feminist pedagogy and teaching methods that she has been responsible for leading in several large public university settings. In these settings, faculty instituted the seminars in the graduate curriculum because they recognized the…

Inspired by the work of Ernest Boyer and the Boyer Commission, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics project was an attempt to adapt their demands for research-based undergraduate learning opportunities to the British context through the pedagogy of placement learning. This article explores the project's attempts to make placement learning…

In response to postcolonial, feminist and subaltern critiques of anthropology, this article seeks to answer the question, "For whom should research be conducted, and by whom should it be used?" by examining the lives and works of four female dance anthropologists. Franziska Boas, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus used…

This article analyzes policy convergence and the adoption of globalizing models by higher education states, a process we describe, following Thatcher (2007), as policy internationalization. This refers to processes found in many policy domains and which increasingly are exemplified in tertiary education systems too. The focus is on governmental…

A focus on adult learning has been quietly driving an increase in local activism among those who traditionally have had the least "voice". It is precisely this kind of grassroots activity that will enable the vision of local democracy and the Big Society to be implemented. In this article, the author hopes to show how a focus on adult…

State support of public higher education has rapidly declined relative to total state spending. Much of this decline in support is due to the rapid growth in spending on such things as Medicaid. However, relative support of public higher education varies significantly between states. This study applies Tandberg's (2009) fiscal policy framework…

The article presents a curriculum-sociological study of "religion" in the classroom. More specifically, it is a study, inspired by Bernstein, Foucault and Bourdieu, that examines various forms of identity politics tied to "religion" and "culture" as these concepts unfold in the classroom in relation to knowledge…