School district takeovers--when a state education agency (SEA) assumes control of a low-performing district--are the most aggressive accountability intervention available to SEAs. Much of the scholarship on takeovers has been skeptical on both normative and pragmatic grounds, but these analyses don't wrestle with what else to do when students'…

Purpose: To improve school organisational performance and innovativeness, and meet diverse student needs, school leaders should be innovative, risk-takers and proactive, thus applying entrepreneurial practices/strategies and market mechanisms. This study aims to investigate, from a schoolteacher's perspective, the degree of entrepreneurial…

While charter schools have long promised choice for students--including students with disabilities--they face many challenges in achieving that promise, including some shared by traditional public schools and some unique to the charter model. One way charter schools can overcome these challenges is through the creation of special education…

This paper explores issues of social justice in relation to the practice of two principals from two Australian public schools. The stories of these principals are set against a policy backdrop in Australia that has seen renewed emphasis on school autonomy reform, on the one hand, and heightened external accountability and compliance, on the other.…

After witnessing creativity in China's test-centric culture, the author calls for developing learners' creativity as a global proficiency emanating from a belief in one's capacity to create.

Quality assurance in higher education has been introduced in Vietnam to improve the quality of the entire sector. Academics are considered key players in the reform plan of the Vietnamese government. This paper discusses the development of the Vietnamese quality assurance approach in higher education reform and how it could be further developed to…

This book presented the methods and modalities of effective school inspections, summarizing the current evidence base and discussing issues of validity and reliability of school inspections in relation to school effectiveness research. In our book we have focused on inspections of single schools which are currently dominating the landscape of both…

Since 1958, the New York State Education Department has officially promoted the policy of consolidating small, rural schools. This policy is delineated in the Master Plan for School Reorganization, and while the centralization of most one-room rural schools has been successful, the state has been less successful in the consolidation of smaller,…

The world has realized that the economic success of the states is directly determined by their education systems. Education is a Nation's Strength. A developed nation is inevitably an educated nation. Indian higher education system is the third largest in the world, next to the United States and China. Since independence, India as a developing…

Drawing on experiences in England over many years, this paper explores the authors' efforts to use collaborative inquiry in order to foster greater equity within schools. All of this is set within national policy contexts that emphasise increased school autonomy, competition, and accountability as central improvement strategies. It is argued that…

Although England was not included in the International Instructional Systems Study because it was not a high-performing jurisdiction by the Study's definition, contributors largely were England-based. Analysing the Study's nine overall aspects of instructional systems, this paper finds that England is out of step with many of the high-performing…

The purpose of this study was to examine the general trend of education governance in the Canadian province of Ontario since 1995 when the Progressive Conservatives led by Michael Harris formed a new majority government. The article is divided into three sections. The first section provides the context and a historical background of Ontario…

This paper sets out the main findings of the International Instructional Systems Study (IISS), conducted by the UCL Institute of Education and funded by the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). The study examined the instructional systems and intended curricula of six "high performing" countries and two US states. The…

This article examines Japanese education system especially relevant to the school curriculum, which might support Japanese high performance in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), mainly through Japanese policy documents. The Japanese education systems have been constructed by the local context of society and politics,…

This analysis and synthesis explores constructs of professional autonomy and accountability using constructivist theory and practice to examine the organizational dynamics of centralization/decentralization, particularly as applied to educational organizations. Major schools of constructivist thought are explored to shed light on…