This paper focuses on educational equity in China using the experience of school choice reform in Shanghai. The education authority in Shanghai has launched a host of policy measures to address "school choice fever" (zexiao re) where parents compete to enrol their children in a top-performing school. The policy initiative has been…

In spite of advances in recognising that girls and boys, and women and men, do not have to be bounded by traditional roles, gender stereotypes persist in education and beyond. Children and youth are affected by gender stereotypes from the early ages, with parental, school, teacher and peer factors influencing the way students internalise their…

This article reveals that, contrary to common knowledge, schooling for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in British Columbia -- Canada's westernmost province -- was not strictly segregated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Officially, government policy stipulated that Indigenous children should attend separate day and…

In India, parents play an important role in arranging and facilitating educational opportunities for their children, starting with the choice of school, arranging after-school classes, and sending them to various non-academic extracurricular classes. Most parents closely follow the academic performance of their children and willingly spend time…

Research has repeatedly proven that parental participation in the education of their children plays a major role in their academic performance and general development. Children whose parents and families in general stay engaged in their education have been shown to perform better than those who do not receive such family support. In Kenya, the…

It was a hot and humid afternoon in 2006, 3 months after the opening of the Children's House at the Infinity Children's School in Hong Kong. A 3-year-old boy selected a table-scrubbing activity. He moved erratically and without purpose, accidentally bumping into another child and spilling water on the floor. Meanwhile, a toddler girl strolled…

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning…

Many reasons exist for these challenges in providing adequate literacy instruction within the school context. For example, a World Bank study found an average 19 percent teacher absence rate across Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru, and Uganda; and many teachers who were physically present were not spending their time teaching in the…

This paper describes the development and standardization of a measure of perceived parenting style. The four styles namely authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and negligent proposed by Baumrind (1971) are scaled based on a quadrant of high and low levels of parental responsiveness and control suggested by Maccoby and Martin (1983). The items…

Sons (daughters) with criminal fathers have 2.06 (2.66) times higher odds of having a criminal conviction than those with noncriminal fathers. One additional paternal sentence increases sons' (daughters') convictions by 32 (53) percent. Compared to traditional labor market measures, the intergenerational transmission of crime is lower than that…

This article starts with a historical perspective on parental involvement in German schools' decision making in the context of historical developments and societal conditions as well as those specific to federal states. Subsequently, a presentation of contemporary school legislation highlights parental rights and duties with respect to parental…

Does maternal education have an impact on children's educational outcomes even at the very low levels found in many developing countries? We use instrumental variables analysis to address this issue in Pakistan. We find that children of mothers with some education spend 72 more minutes per day on educational activities at home. Mothers with some…

This article reports on a research project that investigated the aspirations of primary and secondary school students about access to, and participation in higher education. The research was undertaken at schools in low socio-economic status regional and rural areas of north-eastern New South Wales. The paper discusses the background to the…

This article uses a historical lens to illuminate literacy teaching as it is constructed in two recent reports, "Teaching Reading" and "In Teachers' Hands". In surveying these texts alongside 19th-century sources, we show that an autonomous view of literacy has always held sway, along with a primary focus on reading. Parents'…

Most people probably assume that the quality and type of education that children receive in school influences academic progress, but may be less clear about the ways in which parents can also influence outcomes. When a child has a developmental disability then the most people will be less confident about predicting the effects of schools or…