Access to arts education in the United States continues to be inequitably distributed as a function of socioeconomic status and race. In response, arts practitioners and policymakers have worked to expand access to arts education among children from lower-income households and racially or ethnically minoritized (REM) backgrounds. In so doing, they…

Centerness is defined as a quality of multi-agent systems (groups) where agents share a common set of system goals and interact so the system will achieve those goals. A pair of measures is identified to capture the two dimensions of centerness: distance-weighted fragmentation and average goal centerness. As a case study, the measures of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide advice to organizations on how to become successful in the digital age. The paper revisits Peter Senge's (1990) notion of the learning organization and discusses the relevance of systems thinking and the other four disciplines, namely, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning…

Educational institutions exist in reciprocal relations with broader social and moral ecologies. These ecologies involve interactions of networks of individuals and groups with wider aspects of culture, and are therefore broadly social, and they contain explicit or implicit content with regard to right and wrong, and are therefore moral. There is…

The present paper sparks a complementary argument that the development of standards movement must not be at the expense of sacrificing the achievement of behavioral objectives. Furthermore, due to the systemic and dynamic nature of standards, standards need to be revised off and on. Besides, the present writers taking a more or less relativist…

Vocational qualifications in England are undergoing another round of reform. This paper starts by reviewing the alleged weaknesses of English vocational qualifications, but argues that these do not necessarily establish a case for radical reform. The issue is not so much whether the system needs to be changed as the nature of the change that is…

This is a theoretical article to open the discussion of what an education for sustainable development is supposed to achieve and how teachers can help students to develop skills that might be needed in order to support a sustainable future. The focus in the article will be on education. As it is an article aiming to open this kind of discussion…

In this commentary 26-year Ontario district teacher, Jeff Stickney, begins by surveying balanced approaches to large- and small-scale education reforms: contrasting linear alignment with more complex ecological models, drawing on recent work by Andy Hargreaves (2008; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2012). Next, through a brief case study of School…

A national qualifications framework (NQF) is an instrument used to classify a country's qualifications at different levels. Each level is defined by a set of learning outcomes expected at that level. NQFs can be useful tools in education and training reforms and are vital reference points for lifelong learning and comparing qualifications across…

We examine the distinction between teaching and teachers as it relates to instructional improvement. Drawing from work outside of education on improvement systems and from analyzing the Japanese system of lesson study, we contend that a focus on teaching can shape a coordinated system for improvement whereas a focus on teachers, common in the…

There is much research in the scholarly literature about using technology to support language learning, and particularly English as a Foreign Language, but the technology is rarely integrated into the curriculum, largely because the research is the product of the pressure on faculty to publish. The author explores curriculum integration, based on…

Community college efforts to increase completion rates typically involve small programs or pilots that serve relatively few students and often rely on temporary outside funding. However, small-scale innovations, such as learning communities, supplemental instruction, and mentoring programs--particularly if implemented in isolation from larger…

The "Global Inventory of Regional and National Qualifications Frameworks," the result of collaborative work between the European Training Foundation (ETF), the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop), UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] and UIL [UNESCO Institute for…

Traditionally, the Nordic curriculum has been viewed as a document with school subjects in focus. This article reports on how two national curricula function as instruments for governing education and explores the possible differences in how national curricula govern education. This investigation was carried out by researching curricula for…

Assessment of educational effectiveness provides vitally important feedback to Institutions of Higher Education. It also provides important information to external stakeholders, such as prospective students, parents, governmental and local regulatory entities, professional and regional accrediting organizations, and representatives of the…