The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushered in a period of change in higher-education systems across the former Eastern bloc. Reform-minded leaders in the region sought to introduce western models and policies promoted by foreign development aid agendas. Private higher-education institutions emerged. This qualitative multiple case study examines…

This paper examines the decisions made by French policymakers at a time when France was uncertain about which option to take. The purpose is to follow how actors chart their own course in an environment with plural justifications and how they mobilise resources in several spheres to set up ever-changing networks. The investigation will bear on all…

This study analyzes and describes the links between the curriculum policies of one urban school district in the US and an intervention by the economics firm Standard & Poor's (S&P). It characterizes the languages and values introduced to the district leadership by S&P as ideologically neoliberal. This school-level case study that makes…

The structural reforms of the education system in France (1959, 1963, and 1975) were part both of a global process of democratisation of education launched after the Second World War and of a larger modernisation project in which knowledge producers (experts, scholars and consultants) played a crucial role. Instead of a national approach or a…

Four influential studies on school effectiveness reported by Brookover and Lezotte (1979), Edmonds and Frederiksen (1979), Phi Delta Kappa (1980), and Rutter and others (1979) are limited in their usefulness as recipes for creating effective schools by the following four issues: (1) The four studies differ in their definition of what…