In this paper, we analyse the trajectory of the French testing policy in education since 1973. Regarding its statistical tradition and its ability to produce its own evaluation tool, France may be regarded as an interesting case to interrogate the capacity of national educational systems to meet international standards of testing. Anchored in a…

While attracting international students is the declared objective of many countries of the global North, the regulation of movements of this migrant group does not escape the tensions that characterise policymaking on migration. This paper compares the evolution of student migration policies in three major European destinations--France, Spain and…

Discourses which seek to position different speakers/users of Breton through the use of labels such as 'traditional', 'new', 'learner', 'néo-bretonnant', 'brittophone', etc. draw on persistent essentialist ideologies of language and create, in the process, contested elites and counter-elites in Breton-speaking networks. These discourses can be…

National patterns of power and control in higher education are key determinants of the conceptions of academic excellence and equality that prevail in particular systems. This paper examines five countries with predominantly state-controlled systems of higher education--West Germany, Italy, France, Sweden, and Japan--and two with mixed control…

Four separate but overlapping power centers in French universities are described and discussed: the state authority (minister), faculty, political and trade unions, and students. Confrontations between these powers have characterized French higher education in the last 15 years, and they have been at the root of the concept of autonomy. (MSE)

Traditional Marxist approaches to the state relegate superstructural institutions like the school to a minor role in the process of social change. More recent theories like those of Gramsci, Althusser, and Poulantzas raise the state and the class struggle in the state apparatuses to a much more prominent position: superstructure, including the…

Basic elements of the higher education system are considered, along with variations across nations (the United Kingdom, Sweden, Japan, Italy, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Australia, Canada, the United States, Poland, Yugoslavia, Mexico, and Thailand). Three basic elements of the organization of higher education system are identified:…

The result of an interdisciplinary seminar in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, this book reviews patterns of academic power in several nations. The authors are John H. Van de Graaff, Burton R. Clark, Dorotea Furth, Dietrich Goldschmidt, and Donald F. Wheeler. Separate chapters are devoted to the Federal Republic of…