America's fragmented, decentralized, politicized, and bureaucratic system of education governance is a major impediment to school reform. In this important new book, a number of leading education scholars, analysts, and practitioners show that understanding the impact of specific policy changes in areas such as standards, testing, teachers, or…

In most PISA-participating countries and economies, the average socio-economic background of students who attend privately managed schools is more advantaged than that of those who attend public schools. Yet in some countries, there is little difference in the socio-economic profiles between public and private schools. Why? An analysis of PISA…

This book calls for changes in special-education fiscal policy, claiming that special-education finances need to be more fully incorporated into education-finance literature and fiscal-policy discussions. The first few chapters discuss fiscal and program-policy funding in the United States and in Europe. They trace the history of federal…

The decade 1980-90 saw a spate of educational reconstruction occurring simultaneously in many countries. This book argues that the school restructuring of the past 10 years has been called the "education-reform movement," but that term is somewhat misleading. The current reform efforts seem to aim primarily at the control and governance of both…

This study sets out to examine the relationship, if any, between the decentralization of funding for schools and the prevalence of corruption and fraud. It is based upon work carried out in four countries: Australia (the State of Victoria), the United Kingdom (specifically England), Poland (with particular reference to two cities) and Brazil…

The philosophical underpinning of the purposes of the community college, an examination of the basis for state financial support from a philosophical viewpoint, and an analysis of the ways in which the various states have implemented that philosophy in financial support programs are the central focus of this report. The four current patterns of…

A discussion of higher education in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland assesses policy and provision of education in the two jurisdictions and places them in their international context. The jurisdictions' demographics, trends in participation, and patterns of expenditure are examined first, in the context of both the United Kingdom and…

This report presents comparative data governing the financing of public higher education in each state and the District of Columbia. The model used in data analysis involves the following nine data elements: population, number of high school graduates, public full-time equivalent enrollment, taxable resources, tax revenue collected, state and…

The question of what American colleges and universities should spend to educate their students is addressed. Both societal and institutional factors that determine the costs of colleges' educating their students and longitudinal changes in the unit cost of higher education are examined. The following issues are considered: long-term trends in unit…

This monograph, part of a series that critically challenges conventional definitions of school management and school resources, takes the view that the major resources in schools are culture and knowledge. What counts as culture and knowledge in the school is the subject of continuing debate by individuals and groups who articulate different…

The papers in this book discuss the goals and constraints facing institutions of higher education in Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union countries. In the European Union countries budgetary pressures and the increasing number of students attending institutions of higher education have resulted in serious financial difficulties for many…