Policy Making at the School Level: Some Issues for the 90's

Abstract

In this article we discuss how central governments can promote the development of policy at school level which will lead to quality improvement. The development of school level policy does not mean abandoning the role of central government as a driving force in school improvement, which would clearly be unacceptable in many countries. Instead, it may mean a change in the relationship between policy making at different levels. The main question is: under which conditions can schools develop their own policy that permits them to coordinate and act in unity, but which also fits in the framework of central government policies. This question may be examined from the perspective of central government policy makers, or from that of professional educators working within schools. In this article we choose the latter perspective. We will examine the factors that confront school level policy makers and the ways in which they can deal with them. Our intention is to provide a framework for policy action at the school level, within the assumption that there is a national government policy direction.     

Sexing the Subject: Teachers,pedagogies and sex education

This article analyses the relationship between sexual biography and pedagogic practice. It is based on life history interviews with sex education practitioners (teachers and a school nurse) that aimed to explore elements of these individuals' sexual biographies, their experiences of learning about sex and their pedagogic practice. The article considers why the sexuality of sex educators may be important, how this manifests itself in school and, finally, some of the implications for policy and practice.     

Affecting Education Policy through Border Crossing between Special Education and General Education

ABSTRACT

A review of current self-study research related to teacher education policy in the United States indicates that at local, university, and state levels teacher educators are affected emotionally and professionally by policy and, in most cases, feel that policy is something done to teacher educators as opposed to something to which they can contribute and make a difference. In this article, we use our review as a base from which to consider how both special educators and general educators might use self-study to know one another better, to work collaboratively to affect policy, and to understand how policy affects them. We argue that teacher educators must work together across content areas in order to interrogate the implementation and impact of policy and to influence the development and implementation of policy.     

Proposals for Standarizing Measurement in Education

Abstract

Self-efficacy as an outcome evaluation variable for school personnel prevention training was investigated. A 3-week training institute, Enhancing Student Well-Being, is based on a holistic student well-being construct, with special emphasis given to the prevention of illegal substance use among youth. A measure of self-efficacy, including components of efficacy and outcome expectations, showed significant differences between trained educators and a comparison group of educators. At follow-up, the trained educators retained much of the self-efficacy gains realized during training. Self-efficacy was a viable variable for evaluating prevention training of school personnel.     

Changing Educational Policies in the United States and India: Perspectives of Teacher Educators

Abstract

Educational policy changes are intertwined with teacher education at multiple levels, affecting teacher educators in a variety of ways. Despite the different contexts, teacher educators in the United States and India must fulfill a variety of roles in order to meet the demands within those contexts. This qualitative study compared the cases of seven teacher educators in Iowa in the United States and seven teacher educators in Delhi, India on their common experience of mandated policy changes. Collaboration was found to be central in the teacher education policy implementation process in Iowa, USA and Delhi, India.     

International education as a novel entity in a public education system: the establishment of a new public international school in Israel

Abstract

This study traces the founding process of Eastern Mediterranean International School (EMIS) by analysing the motivations and interests of different stakeholders involved in the establishment process. In this novel initiative students from Palestine, Israel, and other countries study within the Israeli public school system towards an International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with founders, educators, Ministry of Education officials, a parents’ survey, and content analysis of related documents, the authors show how the school was established and approved despite the supposedly contradicting hegemonic discourse of the official Israeli policy. They conclude by suggesting some implications for scholars and policy-makers.     

Parental involvement in educational activities in Tanzania: understanding motivational factors

ABSTRACT

In Tanzania, the education system focuses on schools and teachers as key educators of children, while little attention is paid to the home environment. This study examines motivational factors that may influence parental involvement at home and at school, using Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler’s model of parental involvement as a theoretical framework. Participants were 580 parents of Grade 2 children attending primary schools in three districts of Dar Es Salaam. Parents were invited at school to complete a questionnaire. Regression analyses showed that parents’ expectations for children’s school success predicted home involvement, next to parents’ perceived time and energy, child invitations and parents’ self-efficacy. School involvement was predicted by perceived time and energy, and school and child invitations. In a mediation model role construction had an indirect effect on school involvement through child and school invitations and perceived time and energy. Implications for educational policy are discussed.     

Educators’ perceptions and observations of learner-on-learner violence and violence-related behaviour

Abstract

The aim of this article is to report on an investigation into Free State educators’ perceptions and observations of learner-on-learner violence and violence-related behaviour. The research instrument was an adapted version of Joshi and Kaschak's (1998, 213–215) standardised violence and trauma questionnaire. The first important result from the research was that Free State educators identified physical and verbal abuse as the two most common types of learner-on-learner violence. Secondly, it was found that nearly a quarter of the educators perceive that learners at their respective schools use drugs either daily or at least once a week. It was found that some Free State learners often come to school armed. The quantitative data shed some light on the link between gangsterism and school violence, the role of the police in curbing school violence, educators downplaying the serious nature of school violence, as well as the procuring effect of violent behaviour. Finally, some recommendations regarding school violence are given.     

Problematizing the role of expert within small‐scale school‐university partnerships

Abstract

Since 2001, two teacher educators from distinctive midwestern universities have been engaged in partnerships with two local urban school districts that resulted from their personal relationships with educators and school leaders. By applying Macedo and Freire's (2001) framework of analysis, this article shares their dialogic reflection and assessment of the impact of their roles, intentions, and modes of operandi as qualitative researchers and the effectiveness of pursuing contextually relevant transformative agendas within these partnerships. This reflective analysis provides the forum for examining emergent issues and practices relevant to the intersection of these school and university communities, provides insight into the personal and professional commitments of those involved, and the potential for pursuing similar efforts to advance this agenda.     

From the Editor: Challenges to Guiding the Teacher of Guided Play

ABSTRACT

New education reforms in Australia, and elsewhere in the world, are calling for degree-qualified early childhood teachers to work in prior to school contexts, including child care. Yet, emerging research indicates that the majority of early childhood graduates are averse to work in child care, with a career desire to work in other contexts – primary, kindergarten, preschool. This paper reports on a pilot study that focused on early childhood teacher preparation, with attention to child care professional experience. Interviews with early childhood teacher educators, including program coordinators, focused on the decision making processes about the child care professional experience. Discourse analysis located some of the competing and complex discursive considerations, illuminating the contingencies and tensions that face early childhood teacher educators. The imperatives on reflective thinking and decision making in complex early childhood teacher education landscapes are illuminated. These contingencies and tensions have implications for the workforce they are charged to prepare, as policy imperatives call for teachers prepared and willing to work in child care.     

The teacher educator’s role as enacted and experienced in school-based development

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on teacher educators’ role and how it was enacted and experienced by teachers and leaders in a school-based development project. The arena for the teachers’ professional development was the school, and teacher educators at one teacher-education institution and three schools took part in the research. Teacher educators, teachers and school leaders were interviewed two years and two months after they formally took part in the project, for one year in a pilot program and afterward for three semesters. The findings show that the teacher educators enacted their roles differently, and that they realise that they should have collaborated more and coordinated their experiences from collaborations with teachers and leaders to learn from their experiences in school. The leaders and teachers were satisfied with the teacher educators’ lectures, but the teachers wanted more dialogue with teacher educators and felt that teacher educators should have helped them transform their knowledge into teaching actions in practice. Teacher educators taking part as supporters in teachers’ practice truly could infiltrate instruction and learning. The study demonstrates that culture, structure and content need to be coordinated to enhance school-based development.     

Teacher Education Policy in South Africa: The voice of teacher educators

Teacher educators in a post-apartheid South Africa are being asked to re-conceptualise and re-design their pre-service teacher education programmes to respond to new national policies on teacher education. A sample of teacher educators from various teacher education institutions was interviewed about their understanding, support for and implementation of the new policy and the problems they have faced in making it a reality. This article comments on the potential tension between reform through legislation and reform through personal and institutional vision-building.     

What can policy makers do to encourage integration of information and communications technology? evidence from the irish school system

Abstract

While most countries have invested heavily in information and communications technology (ICT) in education in recent years, the progress with integration of ICT into the teaching of other subjects has often been disappointing. How to encourage integration remains a serious question for policy makers and teacher educators. This article proposes some answers to that question, based on examination of data from the Irish school system. It suggests that ICT integration is associated with two kinds of teacher professional development: postgraduate ICT courses, and short in-service courses focused on specific integrated uses of ICT. The data reveal a strong association between the use of ICT in the school and the ICT usage of the school principal. Finally, it calls into question the use of pilot projects as the agents of change.     

Productive Influences on High School Student Achievement

Abstract

A secondary analysis of the High School and Beyond (HSB) data was performed in order to retest the private-school superiority hypothesis and to examine determinants of high school achievement. This analysis attempted to explain the fixed and alterable conditions which influence the achievement of 26,279 sophomores in reading, writing, mathematics, science, and civics. Multiple regression and partial correlations indicated that those variables beyond the control of educators (i.e., amount of homework completed, television viewing, parental involvement with education) explained much of the achievement variation. However, variables under school control, such as quantity and appropriateness of academic instruction, were found to explain significant and educationally meaningful amounts of achievement variance. With background variables controlled, private schools did not outperform public schools.     

Brave new platforms: a possible platform future for highly decentralised schooling

ABSTRACT

Sweden has one of the most marketised and decentralised school systems in the world while also ranking amongst countries with the highest levels of access to technology in classrooms. Considering the increasingly central role that digital platforms play in the practices of schooling, this article speculates on what might happen during the 2020s in highly decentralised school systems like Sweden’s. Based on current trends in education, directions indicated by platformisation in other contexts and taking a critical speculative approach, it offers a discussion of what could happen to the practices of schooling and the public mission of education. This discussion is intended to raise important questions for researchers, educators and policy makers to consider as the platformisation of schooling unfolds.     

‘If you’re wrong for the place you just don’t survive’: examining the work of early career teachers in context

ABSTRACT

This article presents evidence from across the segregated secondary school system in NSW, Australia, through the close analysis of three cases of teachers’ work in contrasting schooling contexts. Through this comparative approach, the relationship between school context and the work of the early career teacher is foregrounded, troubling views of teaching as reflecting a certain kind of life cycle in which early career teachers in particular are seen to be subject to pressures such as stress and burnout. In contrast, I argue that specificities of context, exacerbated by a market-based policy approach which has driven greater levels of differentiation between schools, have particular consequences for teachers, both in the nature and scale of the challenges with which they are faced. In demonstrating how teachers’ work is affected by context, I also speak back against recent, often ill-defined discourses of ‘classroom readiness’ and ‘teacher quality’, which emphasise the roles of teachers and teacher educators rather the systems within which they work.     

Notes on contributors

This article examines how teacher thinking is socially negotiated yet individually enacted. Through a case study approach, the author explores how the identities of a first-year kindergarten teacher were fashioned linguistically as she moved through the contexts of her teacher education program, the elementary school in which she taught and the personal aspects of her life. Using ethnographic techniques, multiple layers of data were gathered in nested contexts. A theoretical framework was developed by juxtaposing the work of the Russian theorists Valentin Volosinov on the concept of ideologies and M.M. Bakhtin on his notions of language to guide the analysis of data. Findings indicate that by providing prospective teachers with the tools for conceptualizing teacher thinking as social, teacher educators can provide future educators with alternative ways to author their identities and help them to understand that they can create possibilities for all children.     

News and Communications

ABSTRACT

The author examined how local charter school educators respond to the accountability measures being imposed on them. Encouraged by early indications of increased test scores, state and federal policymakers continue to support accountability as an effective means to improve schools. Surprisingly, there has been little research on local educators’ experiences with and responses to such reforms. This lack of research is striking because teachers, principals, and superintendents are directly responsible for the implementation of accountability mandates, including administering tests, teaching to the state standards, and implementing state-approved curriculum packages. In an effort to understand teachers’ and administrators’ experiences with public school accountability, the author explores how educators in 4 charter schools in Michigan understand recent accountability mandates with respect to school reform.