It is the aim of this article to contribute towards an understanding of why Scandinavia and England have achieved very different levels of social integration in their state school systems.

Charismatic as well as politically astute, Ton Nu Thi Ninh is a patient woman--up to a point. As a high-ranking member of Vietnam's Communist Party, and regarded as the most powerful woman in the country, she had to be. But for far too long Ms. Ninh has watched the abysmal state of Vietnam's higher education handicap the country's future…

The tendency to construct grand narratives makes participants in education politics unaware of the particularities of marginalized fields such as music education. One prominent reason for this trend is the discrepancy between the values underpinning education politics and the values of higher music education. This article discusses this problem by…

This article addresses accountability issues that affect music education policy and implementation in the neoliberal education system. Using examples from education reform in Ontario, Canada, the author argues that two forms of accountability imbalances fostered by the neoliberal state--hierarchical answerability over communicative reason and…

This author begins by mapping the policy changes of the past 20 years that have occupied and changed the educational terrain in New Zealand. Fundamentally, the reform of education was premised on ideological conjecture that some changes (structural, administrative, pedagogical and managerial) were required, and that these changes would deliver…

Special educational policymaking is a discursive struggle, a power/knowledge interplay constituted within a realm of contradictory beliefs, values and discourses that frame the context within which the education of disabled children is envisioned and realised. The prevalent policy landscapes are precarious and ever-changing, as different…

President Obama announced a plan to spend an unprecedented $12-billion over 10 years to improve programs, courses, and facilities at community colleges. The money, the president said, will position two-year institutions to produce five million more graduates over the next decade and to play a leading role in rebuilding the economy. But after the…

The methodological question concerns constructing a cardinal social index, in order to assess performances of social agents, taking into account implicit political judgments. Based on the formal structure of a Choquet's expected utility, index construction demands quantification of levels of a meaningful ordinal indicator of overall performance.…

Foucault's concept of governmentality frames a critical discourse analysis of Grade Level of Achievement (GLA) Reporting in Alberta. GLA requires teachers to report to the provincial government a whole number that represents their judgment of each student's achievement in meeting the mandated curricular outcomes in grades 1 to 9 language arts and…

This article offers insight into teacher training that needs to be occurring in the preparation of teachers. The focus is on the preparation practices and one Canadian institution is used to forward concerns. The institution is left anonymous as the intent is not to critique this particular institution but to bring attention to a more general…

The paper explores the changing forms of governance currently being applied to the English further education sector--changes that emphasise the importance of locality. The paper sets the sector within its socio-economic and policy context, examining current policy changes that intend to alter the way in which the sector is managed. It relates…

With a focus on educational provision the area of English as a second language (ESL), this paper takes stock of developments in the last 10 years since the inception of the Australian "Literacy for All" policy in 1998. A review of the issue is timely, not least because of the recent window of opportunity afforded by the first change of…

This article examines the ways in which the complex and at times contradictory project of "conservative modernization" has altered the terrain of education. It extends the arguments I make in "Educating the "Right" Way" (2006) about understanding the "right", about the possibilities of interrupting the right in education, and about our roles in…

This paper seeks to explain why the policy history of school funding in regard to Australian Catholic Education looks and sounds the way it does today through the production of a genealogy of the subject. The questions addressed are, first, why has the funding of Catholic schools in Australia become an occluded historical site since the 1970s,…

Jenny Robson's "Savannah 2216 AD", a dark, futuristic novel for young adults, provides a strong critique on much of the world's predilection for saving Africa's animals at the expense of those human communities who are perceived to be in the way of the preservation of the continent's remaining wild spaces. Using Robson's novel as…