Nations transfer educational reform models for the systematic improvement of education. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Gulf Cooperation Council states, which have implemented primarily Western decentralized reform models to overhaul their educational systems. This article reports non-empirical research, written as a conceptual analysis…

A key thrust of education reform is the spread of innovative ideas and practices oriented toward school improvement and advancements in student's deep learning and teacher's professional development. Framed within concepts of scaling and diffusion, trajectories of innovation spread can afford explanatory and predictive understandings of adoption…

The Chinese National Quality Course Plan is a large-scale project by the Ministry of Education, which has led to the production of more than 12,000 courses from some 700 universities since 2003. This paper describes in detail the purpose of the project and how it is organized at all levels, including how individual courses get selected at…

Explores Florida teachers' failure to accept state-legislated learning models imposed on them. Although 86.7 percent of teachers surveyed identified "reaching" students as the major intrinsic reward in teaching, 74 percent claimed that legislated learning questioned their competency and limited the scope of their work and/or political…

From the monthly Saturday Review supplement, "Education in America, sponsored by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.

Three questions about the relationships between campus autonomy and measures of faculty quality, student quality, and external funding are examined. The results suggest that changes in these measures of university quality are more influenced by state financial support than by state regulation. (Author/MLW)

This document provides a brief history of urban school governance and summarizes some of the unique governance structures that have emerged in six American cities and one Canadian province over recent years. By 1920, ward-based systems in most urban areas had given way to systems with a high degree of centralization. These systems were more…