Leadership for Urban Public Schools

Not far from my office is a unique and important landmark: America's first public school. From this small beginning in 1635, a vast movement grew and resulted in public education for all the nation's children. The education of the young, at public expense, was important in the formation of the United States as a republic. The early leaders of this fledgling nation wanted to ensure that citizens would be prepared to make informed decisions about its governance.     

Race and Color: Revisiting Perspectives in Black Education

Racial inequities, such as systematic disparities in school discipline and achievement outcomes, are a perennial characteristic of public education in the United States. Although attention to interracial chasms such as the Black–White achievement gap is common, limited efforts are devoted to understanding how and why colorism motivates imbalances within communities of color. In this article, I outline how the color complex relates to racial battles and social perspectives within the nation's educational system. Recommendations for altering problematic norms are presented.     

Higher education in Vietnam: key areas need assistance

Many developing countries are in the process of restructuring their higher education system to meet their nation's socio-economic development. As their educational budget is not unlimited, working with international educational institutions has become one of the attractive solutions to improve the quality of their education and to make it relevant to meet their nation's educational demand for economic development. This paper identifies some key issues which have prevented the Vietnamese higher education system from serving effectively its country's open-door policy and provide necessary recommendations to help Vietnam overcome its short-comings and weaknesses. The issues identified together with recommendations, on the other hand, may help some educational policy makers from developed countries select their fields of assistance or cooperation as well as to establish their long term educational strategies to deal with developing countries such as Vietnam.     

Hong Kong Higher Education, 1981–2001: public policy and re-emergent social stratification

In this paper I first place the development of Hong Kong's higher education in the larger context of education and governance histories. Next I describe one of the deepest policy quandaries for Hong Kong's government in charting the futures of its higher education system: whether to view the ultimate benefits of higher education for individuals in terms of ‘sponsored’ versus ‘contest’ mobility. I then turn to evidence from HK census data about the changing distribution of opportunity for higher education. I discuss trends in educational stratification since 1981, focusing most attention on changes in the opportunity for post-secondary and, especially, for university education to the Bachelors' degree level. I discuss methods for the use of Hong Kong's 1981, 1991 and 2001 census, and I present bivariate and multivariate analysis of the changing impact of family cultural and material resources on the odds of continuing and attending education at the university level. From 1991 to 2001, census data suggest there was a reversal of a trend towards greater equality of opportunity that was observed between the 1981 and 1991 census. I conclude by relating the findings from these analyses to future higher education planning in Hong Kong.     

Child Welfare,Education, Inequality,and Social Policy in Comparative Perspective

Using international data on child well-being and educational attainment, this article compares child well-being in the United States to member countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Multiple measures of child well-being are analyzed, such as material well-being (including poverty, unemployment, and income inequality), child health and safety (birth weight, infant mortality, health care, and childcare), educational attainment, and family and peer relationships (including generational cleavages). Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory as an organizational framework, the impact and interrelatedness of these systems on educational attainment are examined, with parallels drawn between a nation's social policies, child well-being, and educational attainment. The author asserts that social policy in the United States is more comprehensive than is commonly believed, although the redistributive benefits of social policies are allocated much differently compared to OECD countries. Explanations for comparative differences in social policy include differences in political culture and political development as well as racial and class conflict. The author concludes that it is difficult to ignore the role of race and socioeconomic class in explaining differences in social welfare expenditures between the United States and European countries because the pattern of social welfare distribution (broadly conceived—including programs, tax breaks, and incentives) falls largely along racial and class lines.     

Skill as metaphor: an analysis of terminology used in Success For All and 21st Century Skills

This paper considers the significance of the term ‘skills’ in recent policy documents concerning the future developments of post‐16 education. This paper argues that the skills debate, as outlined in Success For All and 21st Century Skills, comprises two dominant discourses: it is considered necessary for youngsters to gain skills for their personal employability and the nation's increased prosperity; and the acquisition of skills by students is judged vital for social inclusion and a coherent society. The documents present these dual objectives as being inextricably linked. Treating the signifier ‘skill’ as a metaphor helps expose the ideology behind the Labour Government's thinking on further education (FE). Skills are used to symbolize something of material worth, with a specific exchange value; a tangible product, like a natural resource; social capital; or education and learning. This paper deconstructs these four metaphorical uses of the term skills, within an analysis of Success For All and 21st Century Skills.     

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.     

A Major Measure for Education to Serve Socialist Construction

Comrade Liu Shaoqi was a great Marxist and a proletarian revolutionary; he was an outstanding leader of our Party and state. He consistently emphasized education and was greatly concerned for the growth of our younger generation, and he initiated many important proposals for educational work. From the late 1950s, in compliance with the instructions of the Party Central Committee and Comrade Mao Zedong, he strongly advocated a dual educational system. This was a major measure for implementing the Party's educational policy, making education more suited to the needs of the nation's economic development. However, through a counterrevolutionary design to usurp the Party and seize power, Lin Biao, the "Gang of Four," and company deliberately framed Comrade Liu Shaoqi politically and persecuted him personally. They also leveled many unwarranted charges against the dual education system advocated by Comrade Liu and caused severe damage to the nation's education work. While cherishing the memory of Comrade Shaoqi today, we must study again his talk on the dual educational system in our effort to reform education and make it better suited to the requirements of the general task during the new historical period. We are committed to train more and better talented people to achieve the nation's four modernizations at an early date.     

Becoming-topologies of education: deformations,networks and the database effect

This article uses topological approaches to suggest that education is becoming-topological. Analyses presented in a recent double-issue of Theory, Culture & Society are used to demonstrate the utility of topology for education. In particular, the article explains education's topological character through examining the global convergence of education policy, testing and the discursive ranking of systems, schools and individuals in the promise of reforming education through the proliferation of regimes of testing at local and global levels that constitute a new form of governance through data. In this conceptualisation of global education policy changes in the form and nature of testing combine with it the emergence of global policy network to change the nature of the local (national, regional, school and classroom) forces that operate through the ‘system’. While these forces change, they work through a discursivity that produces disciplinary effects, but in a different way. This new–old disciplinarity, or ‘database effect’, is here represented through a topological approach because of its utility for conceiving education in an increasingly networked world.     

In the Wake of A Nation at Risk: New American Schools' Private Sector School Reform Initiative

Since its publication in 1983, A Nation at Risk has caused several waves and ripples of educational reform. This article puts that report in the context of earlier responses to perceived education crises. One such important response was from the private sector: the New American Schools Development Corporation (NAS). NAS attempted to create, develop, and widely disseminate "break the mold" whole-school designs to improve student achievement in the nation's schools. Despite a history of mixed results, NAS was influential in changing federal policy to support the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program (CSRD). Now embedded in the No Child Left Behind legislation, CSRD has private and public sector support for the nation's continuing attempts to create effective schools. However, the effectiveness of comprehensive school reform at scale in the nation's highest poverty schools remains an open question.     

The political economy of ‘open regionalism’ and education in small (and micro) states: the construction of the Caribbean Educational Policy Space in CARICOM

In this era of amplified regionalisation, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean's (ECLAC) conceptualisation of ‘open regionalism’ is pertinent to examine the role of regional governance mechanisms in constructing what I call the Caribbean Educational Policy Space. With the aid of a latent content analysis of policy documents that focuses on the current wave of regionalism within the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries, I argue that open regionalism is the instrument that facilitates the expansion of education into a regional tradable commodity that is embedded and linked to the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME). I suggest that open regionalism can be further finessed to consider the modalities that make the operationalising of the integrative project possible. In essence, open regionalism is used as a governance framework by CARICOM's states to enact national educational reform. I conclude by arguing that open regionalism is an approach that is driven by the knowledge-based economy, premised upon innovation and inventiveness, which facilitates regional entry into hemispheric relations, and focused on the deepening global relations.     

Child labour,education policy and governance in Cambodia

This paper considers how the issue of child labour is located in Cambodian education policy debates and how it is affected by the major constraints surrounding the Cambodian education sector. In particular, it asks why Cambodian policy makers have not sought to address the issue explicitly despite its considerable, and adverse, impact on children's school education. In doing so it first identifies the Cambodian education sector's passive approach to child labour, leaving it as a problem to be resolved by wider economic development. Secondly, it finds that the major constraints surrounding the education sector, including the issue of its governance, contribute to sustain a wide gap between stated education policies and actual practice, thus further diminishing working children's chances to benefit from a school education.     

A Sociologist Teaches History: Some Epistemological and Pedagogical Reflections

This article discusses the concept of historical sociology in relation to the teaching of a module on an undergraduate degree in Education Studies at a university in the United Kingdom. The module examines the history of education policy in England from 1870 until the present day. Drawing upon comparisons with Social Foundations of Education programs in the United States, I examine some key epistemological and pedagogical issues raised by the interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning followed within the module in which we combine historical and sociological perspectives as a means to understand the evolution of the English education system. In particular, using Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device as an analytical framework, I consider the epistemological congruence of sociology and history as the contributory disciplines of the undergraduate module. From a discussion of the concept of historical sociology, I conclude that although sociology and history are distinct subjects, they share a large amount of analytical ground that thus facilitates the interdisciplinary approach pursued within the module. Following that, I examine some pedagogical issues that have arisen in my experience of teaching upon the module and I discuss how I have addressed these. I conclude the article by making comparisons to relevant examples from pedagogical practices in Social Foundations of Education programs in the United States.     

The governance of families in India: education,rights and responsibility

This paper examines the shifting relations between the family and the state in Indian education policy. It charts how family resources, responsibility, and participation have been variously called upon by the state across three historical conjunctures of education reform: the decades of post-independence planning for school expansion and nation-building after 1947; the global development era of economic liberalisation and decentralisation in the 1990s and early 2000s; and the present turn to a rights-based approach in the context of intensified educational marketisation, as marked by the 2009 Right to Education Act (RTE). Across these periods, we identify an enduring paternalism of welfare governance alongside strategies for devolving state responsibility in matters of school education. The analysis situates the conditions of family responsibility for education under the contemporary RTE, in which parents are expected to be ‘morally’ compelled to meet the state's education goals. Through this analysis, we bring to the fore the politics of family governance in education policy, a politics that is largely overlooked by, despite being central to, research on education and international development.     

A Sociopolitical Eclipse: The Surrendering of Two Super Systems to Promote Equity in U.S. Education

In this analysis, I argue that inequitable social and educational policies and practices hinder equity in the U.S. educational system. I challenge and critique the status quo, and the nation's current efforts toward educational equity. I then propose a radical shift in educational policy – a surrendering of social and political systems for the purpose of promoting equitable schooling conditions.     

Post‐expansionist Adjustments in Secondary Education in a Developing Society: a case study

Following the conclusion of a period of educational expansion during the last two decades, developing nations are now focusing attention upon adjusting some of those innovations made during the recent period of quantitative expansion. The paper examines how Trinidad and Tobago has responded to the need for adjustments in education provision during the current post‐expansionist period. In particular the paper analyzes Trinidad and Tobago's current reaction to the nation's system of double‐shift schooling, a device instituted during the 1970s as part of Government's strategy for universal secondary education. Arguments both for and against the shift‐system are presented, and Trinidad and Tobago's insistence that the mechanism should be dismantled is critically examined. Explanations for the approach taken by Trinidad and Tobago towards the nation's double‐shift schooling are drawn from two sources: arguments about the state of the nation's economy, and policies regarding approaches to educational development planning in developing nations.     

Recruiting,Redefining, and Recommitting: The Quest to Increase Socioeconomic Diversity at Amherst College

While many selective and moderately selective schools have attempted to increase the numbers of low-income students and students of color in their student body, few have successfully done so. In this qualitative case study, I examine the efforts of an elite, private, liberal arts school, Amherst College, as it increased the socioeconomic diversity of its student body, and I highlight the College's comparative success in this endeavor. Using Bourdieu's social reproduction theory as an analytic frame, I argue that Amherst's success is a result of its historic commitment to diversity and equality as well as its contemporary initiatives and the combination of multiple efforts that transcend simple rhetoric. These initiatives include widening the applicant pool by intensifying recruitment efforts and broadening definitions of merit, hiring a dynamic president as the voice and leader of the diversity movement, and garnering widespread institutional support. This article also includes a survey of the status of low-income students and students of color in the nation's colleges and universities over time and a brief history of diversity trends in higher education since World War II.     

Meeting High Standards: The Challenge of Ensuring That Homeless Children Are Part of the All

The Improving America's Schools Act (IASA), particularly Title I, has changed dramatically since the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The new Title I policy ambitiously states: The Congress declares it to be the policy of the United States that a high-quality education for all individuals and a fair and equal opportunity to obtain that education are a societal good, are a moral imperative, and improve the life of every individual, because the quality of our individual lives ultimately depends on the quality of the lives of others. (IASA, 1994).     

Risk management by a neoliberal state: construction of new knowledge through lifelong learning in Japan

This article examines the current developments in Japan's lifelong learning policy and practices. I argue that promoting lifelong learning is an action that manages the risks of governance for the neoliberal state. Implementing a new lifelong learning policy involves the employment of a political technique toward integrating the currently divided and polarized Japanese population – popularly called kakusa – into the newly imagined collective, namely, atarashii kōkyō or the New Public Commons. Examining the macro policy discourse on Japan's educational policy, this article demonstrates Japan's inflections of neoliberal governmentality with the new distribution of responsibility between the state and the individuals through the construction of new knowledge supporting the New Public Commons. In fact, new knowledge is the epicenter of the national educational policy discourse aiming at generating social solidarity in local communities.     

Designing diversity: globalization,textbooks, and the story of nations

I examine selected history textbooks marketed in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. My focus is on representations of indigenous peoples and their place in the text. In design, these textbooks tend to balance inclusively the best of a nation's history with the text of progress. But when compared in a global context, indigenous history, past and present, works as a counter‐text that undercuts the dominant myth of progress, troubling the symbolic coherence of this narrative and the imagined unity of national identity. I seek to articulate an appropriate, in global context, a transnational framework of historical representation, which connects indigenous history with worlds beyond the nation.