A study of the scientific interests of dwellers in small towns and in the country

Congress's role in defining and promoting equality of educational opportunity has evolved over the past 55 years since Brown v. Board of Education. Most recently, all three branches of the federal government have focused more on equality of educational opportunity for individual students rather than for protected classes. In this article, the authors combine two different frameworks to assess Congress's evolving role in ensuring equality of educational opportunity for all students—particularly given the new political and economic realities facing the nation. The first is federalism; the second is policy instruments for advancing varied goals in education, which the authors use to examine specific policy domains where Congress might increase its impact on equality of educational opportunity. These domains are concerned with “incentivizing equity” through competitive grants designed to reduce racial and socioeconomic inequality, improving existing categorical grant programs to make them more targeted and efficient, and strengthening enforcement of existing policies and programs. Throughout, the authors consider how recent research about equality of best be brought to bear on congressional priorities. In conclusion, they discuss the political realities facing Congress in 2012 and beyond, including partisanship and the prospect of cuts to pre-K-12 education spending.     

Educational Equity in the Access to Post-Secondary Education: A Comparison of Ethnic Minorities in China with Aboriginals in Canada

This study provides insight into equity issues in post-secondary education by exploring and assessing the history, the reality and the potential developments in higher education for minority students in China, in comparison to post-secondary education for aboriginal students in Canada. It highlights access to post-secondary education by these minorities in both countries in terms of educational policy enactment, orientation, and its enforcement. The study examines both commonalties and differences in the educational policies of both countries to shed light on how each country is able to grapple with the issue of equity in their respective post-secondary educational systems in response to the principles of liberty, equity and dignity as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This study employs a historical approach to identify the common trends by examining issues concerning access to post-secondary education for ethnic minorities in China and the aboriginals in Canada. Specifically, the study employs a comparative method analyzing how access and equity are defined, how policies have evolved, and the impact that the policy has on the minority students in China and aboriginal students in Canada. The assessment of the access issues in these two countries not only reveals some common trends in the evolution of access norms in the post-secondary education of both countries, but also identifies certain differences in response to their historical traditions, national cultures, and diverse educational structures. The findings are presented in three sections: growth and gap, equality versus equity, and equity and the difference among the difference.     

Solving the equity–equality conceptual dilemma: a new model for analysis of the educational process

Background Over the past four decades there have been a number of controversies arising from the discussion of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’. These concepts are often invoked by policy analysts, policy-makers, government officials and scholars in order to justify or critique resource allocation to different levels of the educational system.

Purpose By creating a new equality–equity goal-oriented model, which allows the combination of different dimensions for each concept with different stages of the educational process, this paper aims to achieve two purposes: (1) to clarify among researchers, educators, evaluators, policy analysts, and policy-makers the notions of ‘equality’ and ‘equity’; and (2) to encourage researchers and evaluators to critically examine and synthesize equality/equity-based research.

Sources of evidence A review of the literature concerning the meaning, goals and assumptions of the concepts ‘equity’ and ‘equality’, and their implications for social and public policy, is presented.

Main argument A survey of recent and earlier debates on ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ among scholars and researchers reveals disagreement and confusion about what those concepts really mean and what they involve in terms of goals and results. It is debatable whether we can have ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ in a society that prioritizes efficiency in resource management over social justice. Certainly, such questions have shaped and guided many discussions and theoretical debates among scholars, policy analysts and policy-makers.

Conclusions Most of the definitions of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ are frequently used by many researchers, evaluators, policy-makers, policy analysts, scholars and educators as if they were interchangeable. Instead of arguing for a unique or simple conception of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’, a set of definitions of those concepts as well as a discussion related to theoretical and policy issues associated are presented. In order to avoid that confusion, the equality–equity model developed in this paper suggests several new directions for analysis and research. It provides some ideas about how ‘equity’ (i.e. ‘equity for equal needs’, ‘equity for equal potential’ and ‘equity for equal achievement’) and ‘equality’ (i.e. ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘equality for all’ and ‘equality on average across social groups’) could be treated and measured in future research in relation to different features of the educational process (availability of resources, access, survival, output and outcome).     

Boundary spanners,network capital and the rise of edu-businesses: the case of News Corporation and its emerging education agenda

This paper provides a critical analysis of News Corporation and argues that through the acquisition of high profile policy actor, Joel Klein, News Corporation has been able to assemble significant network capital to position itself as an entity apparently responsible for the public good and with a role to play in public policymaking. My aim in this paper was to document and analyse how the contexts of policy influence in education are evolving through the involvement of multinational edu-businesses and the quasi-privatisation of the education policy community globally. I analyse the place of education in News Corporation’s current business strategy as exemplary of the changing role that businesses are playing in education policy processes nationally and globally and argue that we are seeing the emergence of powerful new policy actors. This analysis is set against the emerging literature that seeks to analyse the increasing influence of edu-businesses on education policy processes and locates these developments within considerations of changing educational governance structures, new privatisations and public–private partnerships in education. It is argued that boundary spanners like Klein with their intimate ‘inside knowledge’ of state structures are mobilising network capital to frame policy problems and advocate policy solutions in ways that are attractive to education policymakers while also being commercially beneficial to News Corporation and their shareholders.     

Creating an LNG ready worker: British Columbia’s blueprint for extraction education

Since 2011, the government of British Columbia (BC) has focused on building the Canadian province’s economy through the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) sector. In service of this endeavour, the government launched the Skills for Jobs Blueprint, which attempts to more clearly align BC’s education system with resource extraction industries. In this paper, I argue that at the heart of this policy is the idea of education for, through, and as extraction. Conceptually, ‘extraction education’ focuses on supply (what we can take out of the earth, institutions, and individuals) rather than demand (what is needed to put into the educational system to meet needs of the land, institutions, communities, and individuals), and is problematic on environmental, economic, employment, equity, and educational fronts. In theorising ‘extraction education’ I extend Freire’s ideas on ‘banking education’ and briefly explore dialogic, problem-posing counters to it.     

Policy enacted – teachers' approaches to an outcome-based framework for course design

In this paper, we report on how teachers in Higher Education enact policy. Outcome-based education (OBE) serves as an example of a governmental educational policy introduced with the European Bologna reform. With a hermeneutic approach, we have studied how 14 teachers interpreted this policy and re-designed their courses. The findings show teachers' enactment of policy framed as different approaches to OBE: container, technocratic, pragmatic or ideological. The approaches range from being (1) highly regulated to being autonomous; and (2) from having a teacher-centred orientation to having a student-centred orientation to teaching–learning. Teachers who reinterpreted the policy to fit their learning-centred orientation used it to facilitate a joint development process together with colleagues. Thus, policy may stimulate development of teaching–learning.     

Examining Mexico's Values Education in a Globally Dynamic Context

Discussion about values education has begun to dominate the educational policy agenda in a number of countries over the last 5 years. Of particular relevance are questions on what to teach, how and why. This discussion seems to be more prominent among those countries undergoing vigorous political, economic and social change. In the last few years, Mexico has intensified its active search for democracy and invigorated its march toward modernisation. Both of these intentions have proven to have important influences on the values the Mexican state and educational policy makers see as necessary to be transmitted via education. Simultaneously, Mexican identity, which has evolved relatively consonant with the aims of a centralised and hierarchical state and in line with the principles of the 1910 Revolution, is being continuously challenged by internal as well as external forces. In this article we describe a study designed to understand the approaches to Mexico's values education as a particular instance of a larger comparative project to explore values education in a globally dynamic context. After describing Mexico's political economy, we present the current policy and approaches to values education in general and in the regions included in the Mexican study in particular. We present the findings from a survey to policy makers and educational élites and show regional differences and similarities. We discuss findings from other country contexts to contrast them with the Mexican findings in selected areas. We conclude with a discussion on how this study may help initiate a policy dialogue on values education in Mexico.     

Excellence for all children false promises! The failure of current policy for inclusive education and implications for schooling in the 21st century

This paper argues that the claims of current UK education policy, for children with special educational needs (SEN) toprovide excellence and equality of opportunity, are false. Critically examined are issues of social justice and equity in relation to the work of disability theorists and this critique is then applied to recent policy in education, in particular the Green Paper Excellence for All Children; Meeting Special Educational Needs, to demonstrate that as long as the organization of schooling, the curriculum, and assessment and testing procedures remain unchallenged, equal educational opportunity will remain amyth. In conclusion, having shown that the central energy in educational change seems to be devoted to perpetuating the status quo, thus reinforcing inequality and discrimination and precluding excellence for all children, this paper attempts toset anew agendafor the 21st century that might possibly offer agenuine entitlement for all children to an equal educational opportunity. Although the paper is centrally concerned with a critique of policy in the UK, it is believed that the implications have international relevance as they are fundamental issues relating to human rights and equity.     

Teacher education for rural–regional sustainability: changing agendas,challenging futures,chasing chimeras?

Rural schooling has remained a concern for policy‐makers, employers, teacher education providers and schools throughout our recent history. In particular, the allegedly variable quality of teaching and learning in rural Australia is a major concern for teacher educators and educational leaders alike, with the provision of quality services for rural Australians a major equity issue in social as well as political terms. Working from an explicitly situated perspective, this paper explores these issues in relation to a set of current and recent research projects and government reports, with particular reference to a study currently exploring the articulation of teacher education and rural schooling in New South Wales. This is contextualized within a larger agenda of national and environmental sustainability which raises the key issue of social policy and educational priorities as we look forward into a radically uncertain future for teacher education, rural schooling and rural‐regional sustainability.     

Informing in the Information Age: How to Communicate Measurement Concepts to Education Policy Makers

Current educational policies rely on educational assessments. However, the technical aspects of assessments are often unknown to policy makers, which is dangerous because sound assessment policy requires knowledge of the strengths and limitations of educational tests. In this article, we discuss the importance of informing policy makers of important psychometric issues that should be considered whenever tests are proposed for specific purposes. We discuss the types of information that are important to communicate to policy makers, how to best convey this information in a manner in which it can be understood, and how to be seen as a valuable source of information to education policy makers. We end with some specific steps organizations such as NCME can take to inform policy makers and advocate for valid educational assessment policies.     

Neoliberal versus social justice reforms in education policy and practice: discourses,politics and disability rights in education

This article uses critical discourse analysis in order to discuss the equity and social justice implications of an envisaged education reform agenda in Cyprus, as articulated by two consultation reports commissioned by the World Bank. The reports highlight, inter alia, the imperative to improve teaching and enhance accountability regimes with regard to students’ learning. Selected extracts from these documents are analyzed in order to highlight the absence of a social justice discourse in the rhetoric of educational reforms, despite the alleged centrality of a social justice discourse in official policy. The reports fail to include issues of social justice and learner diversity in discussing the necessity to strengthen the existing teacher policy framework and to mobilize structural educational reforms. This omission is indicative of the neoliberal imperatives that drive the envisaged education policy reforms as well as the low priority attributed to issues of equity and learner diversity, with particular reference to students designated as having special educational needs and/or disabilities.     

Discourse analysis as theory,method, and epistemology in studies of education policy

ABSTRACT

Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication, and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself (e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often left implicit which can lead to murky relations to larger onto-epistemological questions of how we construct findings from data as well as the nature of policy. In this interpretive analysis, we synthesize a corpus of 37 peer-reviewed journal articles that bring together educational policy and analyses of discourse from varying theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to better understand the breadth and scope of how discourse is defined and operationalized in studies of educational policy, including in ways that are sometimes incommensurate with authors' stated theoretical and methodological positions. After first laying the theoretical groundwork for analyses of discourse in the field of educational policy, we then illustrate how discourse analysis is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, within contested paradigmatic landscapes. We conclude with an argument for discussions across theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms about how the concept of discourse lends itself to different epistemological vantage points on educational policy.     

The “flawless” school and the problematic actors: Research on policy documents to counteract discrimination and degrading treatment in schools in Sweden

In Sweden, the anti-discrimination initiatives and the efforts against degrading treatment are promoted by two laws indicating self-regulatory and transparent actions toward preventing both. To be successful, it is important that everybody involved in the work has the same understanding of the task and that everybody understands written formulations of local policy documents, here labelled equity plans, in order not to reinforce inequalities when counteracting discrimination and degrading treatment. Our aim is to explore the world-views that are expressed by the schools in their equity plans. We ask what are the perceived causes of discrimination and degrading treatment within the schools, what solutions in the equity plans emerge and which subject positions are constructed and made possible. The analysis rendered three discourses of which we can see recurring signs in the material and these have been labelled The perfect school discourse, The designated discourse and The educational discourse. These discourses are different in how they relate to discrimination and degrading treatment in school and they also provide different opportunities for students. We conclude that policy-making is important as a means to change discriminatory patterns and we suggest how to avoid drawing on discourses that are likely to counteract the goals.     

近30年来政策话语对教育公平的关注——基于《教育部工作要点》的实证研究

以教育部年度《工作要点》为研究素材,运用文献计量方法对政策文本进行解读,考察近30年来我国教育公平问题的政策关注点及走向发现,《工作要点》对教育的城乡差异、区域差异、阶层差异和教育补偿均有涉及,关注点分布均匀,新世纪后对教育公平问题的关注面有所扩展。从整体走势看,政策话语对公平问题的关注呈低起点、快提升的特点。《工作要点》的用词和行文中对农村地区、农村教育和农村地区教育对象表现出明显的话语关注,正是中央的文件精神在教育政策中的具体体现,表明我国教育政策对教育区域公平的关注日益具体和深入。教育公平将成为政策话语的重要组成部分。     

Reframing the Racialization of Disabilities in Policy

Racial disproportionality in special education is a deep seated and complex educational inequity plaguing the United States educational system. In this article we outline how the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, although a civil rights based legislation, cannot sufficiently address racially disproportionate outcomes in special education. We argue that mandating equity through technical and procedural mandates cannot attend to the sociocultural and social contexts in which policy is appropriated to practice. We outline how symbolic changes to educational practice do not account for the effects of personal biases and the complexities associated with how race manifests in society and within policy mandates. We conclude with recommendations for third order change (Welner, 2001), which challenges practitioners to not just comply with educational policy but, to also reflect on their own capacities, beliefs and understandings of disproportionality within broader social and cultural contexts.     

Issues of Power,Masculinity, and Gender Justice: Sally's story of teaching boys

Despite calls for a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and equity that recognizes how broader relations of gender and power continue to produce injustices for many females, essentialized accounts expressing concern about boys’ poor educational performance remain the most common refrain in dominant equity discourses across Western contexts. This common refrain characteristic of current large scale gender reforms, such as Australia's parliamentary inquiry into the education of boys, Boys: Getting it right, is driven by a standards rather than social justice focus and thus creates silences around issues of gender injustice, power, and constructions of hegemonic masculinity. In this paper, I present “Sally's” story as a disruption of these silences. Sally is a young English teacher at “Penfolds College”, an all boys Catholic school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). Her story, in illustrating how particular boys draw on broader discourses of masculinity to sexually harass and intimidate her, highlights the inadequacies of dominant public and policy discourse in terms of its failure to locate boys’ educational issues within broader contexts of inequitable gender relations.     

Revisiting educational equity and quality in China through Confucianism, policy, research, and practice

The promotion of educational equity and improvement of educational quality in China are contextualised in tenets of Confucianism and policy directives, inspiring educational research and practice. In this paper, we first explore the historical and cultural roots of educational equity and quality through Confucianism and elaborate on the current policy priority that aims to address educational equity and quality. We then present an overview of research on equity and quality in Chinese education. Informed by Confucianism, policy, and research, we pose a framework to structure our investigation and analysis of three illustrative examples, namely the Special Post Teacher Plan, amalgamation of rural schools, and schooling of floating children. Drawing insights from Confucianism, policy, research, and practice, we conclude that the promotion of educational equity through high quality provision of education for disadvantaged groups can help to narrow the gap in educational quality currently existing in China.     

A question of autonomy: Bourdieu’s field approach and higher education policy

The concept of field forms the centre of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and the notion of ‘autonomy’ is its keystone. This article explores the usefulness of these underexamined concepts for studying policy in higher education. It begins by showing how Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach enables higher education to be examined as a distinct and irreducible object of study. It then explores the value and limitations of this conceptualization through analyses of policy during two contrasting moments of transition in the same field. First, the insights offered by a field approach are illustrated by analysing the new student debate over the creation of new universities in early 1960s English higher education. This shows how the field’s relatively high autonomy shaped the focus and form of policy debates by refracting economic and political pressures into specifically educational issues. Second, considering contemporary changes in policy highlights how the erosion of the social compact underpinning higher education has increasingly fractured autonomy, necessitating the development of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. A distinction between positional and relational dimensions of autonomy is introduced to capture an increasing disjuncture between the origins of the actors running higher education and of the principles they are adopting, respectively. These concepts are utilized to illuminate the effects of current moves towards marketization and managerialism in higher education on principles, practices and identities within the field.     

BROADENING THE DEBATE: COMMENTS ON MICHAEL J. FEUER'S MODERATING THE DEBATE

Abstract. In Moderating the Debate: Rationality and the Promise of American Education, Michael Feuer argues that insights from cognitive science and the theory of bounded rationality can help us understand why educational policy makers overreach in seeking optimal solutions to educational problems. In this essay, Emily Robertson argues that cognitive science is of limited help for two reasons. First, since the findings of the theory of bounded rationality are supposed to describe how we actually do make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, it is unclear how those findings can help us explain why educational policy makers have apparently used different decision‐making strategies. Second, the idea that educational reform can be set right by being made the province of more fully rational policy makers neglects the public, value dimension of education, and thus obscures some of the true sources of overpromising.