Schools develop mission statements in part to communicate their purposes of schooling to internal and external audiences. The goal of this study is to employ text analytic techniques to analyze school mission statements. Focusing on Arizona and New Jersey's schools, we seek to understand: 1) what themes (topics) emerge from their mission…

In this article, I pose the question of what constructs of 'global citizenship education' are being mobilized by key international actors. I undertake a comparative analysis of three key United Nations (UN) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) documents that have emerged in the past 5 years to frame the…

An in-depth understanding of field-level educational school goals and educational leadership action trajectories as embodied and represented in school vision "content" is of scholarly and practical importance. This is even more true in an era of expanding social pluralism and rising school autonomy owing to the leadership and policy…

This study focuses on the inclusion of the American Psychological Association's learning goals in the mission statements of undergraduate psychology programs across the US. We reviewed the mission statements available on websites for 1336 psychology programs listed in the Carnegie classification. Results of a content analysis revealed that of the…

"Go to temples of science and ideas of Europe. Imitate the Tugendbund, 'the Union of Virtue', of which thousands of German youth are the members. Always keep the rule of 'Fit soul is in fit body' in mind" (Petrov, 2013, p. 72). This study aimed to show the similarities, in terms of expression, emphasis, and implication, in the…

Novice teachers begin their careers with certain instructional ideals; however, in practice, novice teachers tend to enact classroom practices that only partially align with these ideals--a phenomenon referred to as the problem of enactment. This article explores this phenomenon by investigating the classroom thinking of three novice teachers.…

This article analyzes three USAID education strategy documents (1998, 2005, and 2011) as well as USAID's requests for proposals for three projects to assess how teachers are represented. The main findings indicate that USAID education strategy documents a) treat teachers as human capital, a human resource input, rather than as human beings and b)…

As social and economic problems change, so do the goals of education reformers. This content analysis of presidential debates transcripts, state of the union addresses, and education budgets from 2000 to 2015 reveals the ways in which presidents and presidential candidates have framed education goals thus far in the twenty-first century. Using…

Local control of schooling has been considered a defining feature of the American school system; however, in the past several decades of public schooling has also increasingly been subject to the influence of extralocal institutional mandates that encourage curricular and organizational standardization. We conducted a content analysis of 480…

This paper attempts to address reasons that Literacy for All and thus Education for All (EFA) may be such difficult goals to achieve and explores strategies to address them by examining the action plans submitted by 28 countries to UNESCO in preparation for the High-Level International Round Table on Literacy that took place as a closing event for…

Once again, the National Curriculum orders for English are being rewritten. The writers of the new curriculum have looked to the education systems of "high-performing jurisdictions" for inspiration. The result is a curriculum draft that offers a limited view of the subject and one which apparently fails to prioritise the needs of the…

A mission statement that identifies the goals and aims of an honors program is a key step in program development. The National Collegiate Honors Council's Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program states unequivocally that a successful honors program "has a clear mandate from the institution's administration in the form of a…

The OER movement originated and integrated into ODE developments. Mega Universities (MUs) are among the most important of ODE providers worldwide should be to be the primary organizations for providing access to OER. So far, however, in-depth studies on OER developments in the Asian MUs were very limited. This study focuses on the developments,…

This essay reviews six competing positions on U.S. school reform: a speech from Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System"; Frederick Hess's "The Same Thing Over and Over"; Charles Payne's "So Much Reform, So Little Change"; Anthony Byrk and others' "Organizing School for…

This article uses curriculum-making frameworks to analyse and reconstruct the Chinese curriculum-making model and unpack the dynamics, complexity and constraints of China's curriculum reform since the early 1990s. It argues that curriculum reform is China's main human capital development strategy for coping with the challenges of the 21st century,…