Introduction

On July 9, 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its landmark school desegregation decision, Sheff v. O'Neill. More than a decade later, Hartford's schoolchildren are as segregated as they were when the case was first filed in 1989. Based on data from a statewide survey and data collected from two focus groups of white parents collected shortly after the State's High Court ruling, this investigation reveals that the racial attitudes of white parents were, from the beginning, a major obstacle to a successful resolution of the Sheff impasse.     

Revisiting an Abandoned Practice: The Death and Resurrection of Collection Development Policies

Academic libraries have a long tradition of endorsing and creating written collection development policies to communicate, both internally and externally, their dynamic collection practices. As revealed by a literature search, academic libraries, over time, appear to have abandoned this practice. This article documents how Texas A&M University Libraries embraced the ambitious task of resurrecting written collection development policies and, as part of this process, assessed the current state of collection development, systematically planned for future collection growth, and identified emerging fields of research requiring additional collection support. This process also undertook the integration of collection development into the organizational culture of the libraries. Reflecting on this process, the authors present the case for creating and maintaining written collection development policies in academic libraries.     

Remembering Art Through the Art of Memory

An experiment was conducted in which the face-name mnemonic was applied to the task of associating 14 artists' names with two styles of their artwork, portraits and thematic paintings. Following study of the 28 items, mnemonic students outperformed “own best method” control students on both immediate and delayed matching tests. Further, mnemonic students maintained that advantage on a two-day delayed “transfer” test that required the identification of “new” paintings by the same artists. In addition to replicating prior positive mnemonic artwork-learning findings, we found that thematic paintings are generally easier to associate with names than are portraits — likely because they are more distinctive, and because they provide a more “target-rich environment” for making mnemonic associations. Implications of our findings for remembering artwork and other picture-word content mnemonically in educational and real-world contexts are discussed.     

Abdication of the Education State or Just Shifting Responsibilities? The appearance of a new system of reason in constructing educational governance and social exclusion/inclusion in Finland

The connections between the new governance in education and new procedures of social exclusion and inclusion in Finland are examined. The main focus is on the emergence of a specific discursive formation constituted by an intersection of the myths of competition, corporate managerialism, an educational clientele and social democracy with images of rational choice makers and invisible clients (pupils) and individual-centred learning professionals (teachers) in a mass institution. The research material is extensive, including national statistical data, education policy texts, interviews with educational actors at the national, municipal and school levels and a survey of pupils. The conclusion of the paper outlines a new system of reason as a historical shift of responsibilities in the national education system.     

Northern Youth under the Siege of Educational Policy Change: Comparing youth's educational opinions in Finland,Sweden, Spain,Portugal and Australia

The question posed in this article is how differences between the five countries in the organisation of social policy and education are related to the educational opinions of the youth. In short, what we are dealing with here is how and to what extent social structures, ideologies and norms are transmitted to the level of attitudes. The theoretical framework used in the analysis is the welfare state typology by Esping-Andersen. Practically identical data sets were gathered approximately simultaneously in Australia, Finland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, during January and February 2000. The youths were 15-16 years of age, in the last grade of obligatory education. For the piece of research introduced in this article, five variables and three background variables were chosen. The final pooled data file had 3008 cases (Finland 567, Sweden 413, Spain 788, Portugal 605 and Australia 635). Generally the educational opinions of the youth differed quite clearly along the lines of welfare state regime, although not in every case in the way expected. As the representative of the liberal welfare state mode, Australia clearly differed from the rest of the countries, especially concerning the competitiveness of pupils.     

Equity for sale: ethical consumption in a school-choice regime

The promotion of equity in Australian education has come to present itself to parents in ways which are shaped by the marketisation and internationalisation of schooling. This paper argues that, as in other markets, ethical consumption has become a key model for both schools as providers and parents as consumers to engage with issues of equity. We identify how the phenomenon of ethical consumption is reflected in the promotional strategies of elite private schools, and how this framing of equity occludes a clear vision of inequalities in the distribution of resources and access across different educational sites. We reflect on the extent to which outreach and service programmes in elite schools fulfil their stated goals or are self-serving.