More than three decades ago, the debate for Higher Education Act was open to the public. Today the process of crafting a compromise bill looks very different, and the forces shaping the major law governing student aid have shifted in ways both significant and subtle. The changes have given new voices a say in policy decisions and made it harder…

When Congress passed the GI Bill, it linked the accreditation process with the distribution of federal funds. As Congress saw it, accreditation would ensure accountability without subjecting institutions to harmful external controls. While accreditation began as a voluntary system, it has now become virtually mandatory. Policymakers and trustees…

This article presents the author's critique on Paul G. Woodford's positions with regard to music education and the notion of liberal democracy. The author seeks to broaden the contextual/historical scholarship around John Dewey and makes it clear that liberalism is a contested concept, as is democracy. He calls for contemporary responses to…

This article outlines and appraises the considerable criticism of educational research, both in the United Kingdom and in North America, and shows how it has pointed to a narrowing of what counts as good or worthwhile research in the policy discourse. In particular, this involved prioritising research that purports to show clearly and unmistakably…

This article is based on a qualitative interview study among former political prisoners in Turkey sentenced to years of imprisonment due to their links to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). In the aftermath of the 1980 military coup in Turkey, the Turkish left was prosecuted--and nearly eradicated--by the military; accusing thousands of being…

This article advances a conceptualization of the rural-urban interface that is centred on a historically and spatially informed politics of place situated within local-global connections. The research is a case study of an inter-municipal development plan called Alberta's Industrial Heartland. Located near the City of Edmonton, in Alberta, Canada,…

The message emerging from a recent research series on youth civic and political participation is clear: today's youth are not disengaged from associational and small "p" political life, but they are increasingly disenchanted with formal political institutions and practices. Generation Y (those born after 1979) has less formal political…

The concept of City Academies owes much to the plan for a network of City Technology Colleges announced by Conservative Education Secretary Kenneth Baker in 1986. This article argues that all this can be viewed as part of the inroad of business into state education, with private sponsorship seen by government as the magical solution to the…

Of all Tony Blair's education policies during his decade as prime minister, one of the most controversial was his plan to create a network of academies--effectively, private schools funded by the taxpayer. This piece explores the origins of the policy and recounts the widespread concerns and criticisms with which it has been beset.

The author traces the history of the campaign to stop Islington Green School being closed and turned into an academy specialising in business and financial services. Although the campaign, after a number of successes now looks as if it might fail in its immediate objective, the author argues that the battle was still worth fighting because of the…

The social work literature is replete with studies evaluating social workers' direct practice interventions, but strikingly few have assessed how well social workers are faring in the political arena. This study tests a major theoretical model, the civic voluntarism model, developed to explain why some citizens become involved in politics, whereas…

In his article, Steven Klees claims that certain economic policies have been a failure in general and specifically in education. He has it backwards. His characterisation of the economics profession has not been true since the 1960s. Nobel Prizes to Simon, Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz illustrate a flowering of ideas in fields of behaviourial and…

Supporters of bilingual education are hoping that the election of Barack Obama as president will lead to a thaw in attitudes toward what they consider a proven educational method that has been ignored--or worse--by the Bush administration. Advocates are encouraged by the endorsement of bilingual education by President-elect Obama in the recent…

Australia's system of school funding is notoriously complex and difficult to understand. This article shines some light on this issue by describing clearly the processes of school funding that currently exist in Australia. It describes the steps taken by federal and state governments to provide over $30 billion each year to government and…

The failure of the Association for Education in Citizenship to gain official support for the secular and pedagogically progressive forms of education for citizenship that its founder members endorsed has previously been explained by the political impotence of the association's founder members and the professional conservatism of the educational…