The Forum Guide to Data Quality provides best practices from districts and states for maintaining quality data as these agencies regularly review and revise their methods for working with data, as well as their expectations for all staff who are responsible for education data and their quality. This resource is intended to help districts and…

After reading about the successful Finnish education system, a group of American educators traveled to Finland on an 8-day study tour of three cities to observe several schools and talk with educators there. In this reflective paper, the author describes and analyzes certain aspects of Finnish education as compared with public education in the…

In advancing educational inclusion efforts this critical position paper makes explicit the relevance of new materialism as a pedagogy to counter the dominant special education models in Canadian and Australian school contexts. This paper argues the implementation of special education policies and programs do not adequately address the complexity…

This paper reviews evidence on the interplay between professional standards for teachers, the content of teacher education and educational sciences, and provides three case studies to illustrate these interactions from Estonia, Australia and Singapore. In particular, it investigates what aligning teacher education programmes to standards really…

A general inductive analysis was applied to 98 submissions made to a recent review of New Zealand's tertiary education system, primarily to enable those interested to engage with multiple viewpoints about this highly complex educational system. The analysis yielded three substantial themes that reoccur throughout the submissions and that may…

Since the publication of the 2000 PISA results highlighting Finland's school children ranking #1 in the world for reading, and #3 for mathematics and science, fascination with Finland's educational system has piqued the interest of educational researchers worldwide. Researchers have been captivated by the paradoxes of the Finnish education system:…

The study presents basic information on the curricular transformation of physical and sport education in Slovakia after the year 1989, which is related to the education process in the 21st century. What is more, it points to the basis for modern transformation in relation to sports as well as to insufficient undergraduate teacher training and its…

The concept of a Nordic model of education is sometimes used to refer to the considerable similarities of education reforms and systems of the five Nordic countries (i.e. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) during the second half of the 20th century--reforms that aimed at social justice, equality and cohesion not least by providing…

This article examines the integration of refugees into the Germany's educational system, focusing on K-12 schooling and Syrian refugees. It criticizes the current approach to integration because the system fails to address the specific needs of refugees and neglects the potential contribution they have to offer in terms of their cultural…

Governing multi-level education systems requires governance models that balance responsiveness to local diversity with the ability to ensure national objectives. This delicate equilibrium is difficult to achieve given the complexity of many education systems. Countries are therefore increasingly looking for examples of good practice and models of…

Educational agencies are going through a difficult transition, with important consequences in terms of de-legitimacy of the social mandate historically assigned to the school. The reason for this widespread unease can be traced to the fact that today we live in a complex system. This paper arises within this problematic framework with the intent…

Portugal, like many other countries, faces obstacles regarding school-based sexuality education. This paper explores Portuguese schools' approaches to implementing sexuality education at a local level, and provides a critical analysis of potential strengths and weaknesses. Documents related to sexuality education in a convenience sample of 89…

There has been an increasing focus in policy and practice on adopting inclusive pedagogy as a way of reconceptualising how schools work with children with special educational needs (SEN). The paper considers the split between knowledge and pedagogy inherent in some dominant strains of "inclusive pedagogy". Drawing on the "knowledge…

Our paper has as its first aim to highlight the fact that the approach on which studies about educational policies or the politics of education (the second concept being more widely used in social sciences) have been based so far involves returning to the stance posited by J.A. Maravall--a category composed of ideas, foundations, mind-set,…

This article focuses on analysing the effect of educational differentiation policies of OECD educational systems on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on data from PISA 2009. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a definition of two subgroups of disadvantaged students: those that achieve high scores, and those obtaining scores…