Studies of global university rankings often assume that rankings as Anglo-American policy scripts have an increasing influence resulting in a convergence of policies and practices, or that the ideas of rankings continue to diverge into national types. In this article, we take a middle ground by arguing that when an idea of ranking is grounded in a…

A great deal has been written about the rise of the world-class university and global university rankings over the past two decades. Much of this work focuses on either the efficacy of the indicators used to measure world classness or on the purposes they serve regarding student choice in an international market. However, less attention has been…

The major aim of recent school education reform in China is to improve educational equity and quality. This paper aims to explore a collaborative reform in a school district in Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province. The major focus of the reform has been a change of school management from "government" to "governance," which is a shift…

Unlike in the US and other western countries, the higher education market in Germany has been sheltered from competition. This changed recently, when a governmental "excellence initiative" began to allocate substantial supplementary funds dependent on higher education institutions' performance, in 2005. This study is aimed at assessing…

The article reveals specific features of functioning systems of higher education quality monitoring at the present stage, taking into account national traditions, historical experience and mentality of the population. The article introduces a comparative analysis of monitoring actors at national, regional and local levels in two countries. The…

This article is based on the analysis of the changes in global university rankings and the new "products" based on rankings data in the period since mid-2011. It is a summary and continuation of the European University Association (EUA)-commissioned report "Global University Rankings Their Impact, Report II" which was launched…

John Dewey was inspired by what he termed "the miracle of shared experience and shared communication." His faith in the power of individuals working in democratic association also included warnings of a darker side, the "monstrosities" that individuals can become when they live and work in isolation from others. In this…

The ranking of universities today is traceable to the pioneer efforts of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education in 1970 when it started the classification of US Colleges and Universities. But the present-day ranking of universities in a form of league table at national levels was started in 1983 by the US News and World Report, and was later…

The purpose of this study was to collect reliability and validity data on the School Characteristics Inventory (SCI), a quantitative measure based on Sternberg's (2000) theory of contextual modifiability. Data were collected from a national sample of middle school teachers and from teachers participating in a 3-year study investigating teachers'…