At the 2016 Commission in Birmingham, I reported on a Quality Music Education Framework that Dr Emily Wilson and I had developed for the Victorian Department of Education, which was to become a framework for the delivery of "quality" music education across the State of Victoria for the school years, Foundation to Year 10. In this address…

Despite the rapid growth of English Medium Instruction (EMI) programmes around the globe, the language goals in such programmes have not been clearly defined, making it difficult to evaluate their success. Accordingly, our paper reports on a study that attempted to identify the language goals, operationalised as the vocabulary expected of…

Purpose: We intent to provide a comprehensive picture of Hungarian social science education, to review the constituents of social science literacy, a systematic analysis of the curriculum and its changes since 1989 and of the available research in this field. Design/methodology/approach: The findings are based on the analysis of educational…

This paper investigates an obvious paradox in the pre-tertiary music/aesthetic education of Ghana, which defies the pedagogical principles of continuity and progression. This paradox involves the simultaneous disappearance and growth of music/aesthetic education at the foundational basic schools and high schools respectively. Growth at the high…

High school graduation rates have increased dramatically in the past two decades. Some skepticism has arisen, however, because of the confluence of the graduation rise and the starts of high-stakes accountability for graduation rates with "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). In this study we provide some of the first evidence about the role of…

The purpose of this article is twofold, firstly, it aims to contribute to the literature of school leadership and practices from the unexplored, low-income country, Nepal and secondly, to deliberate how these practices are uniquely and situationally enacted within their context. A qualitative approach was used to carry out the study in three…

Background and Context: Statewide test-based accountability in the United States began with minimum competency assessments in public schools during the 1970s, starting in Florida and other Southern states. Controversies over IQ (intelligence quotient) testing contributed to the development of "criterion-referenced" exams that became the…

In the high-stakes accountability English educational system, decisions made by government and agencies about curriculum, pedagogy and assessment drive school planning and actions. This paper analyses the drivers for the recent change to French German and Spanish GCSEs and highlights particular areas of the new specification which may damage the…

Success in music theory studies appears to be simply a matter of learning the rules and applying them. This is not the case with aural skills, which include labelling a scale played on piano, or writing a rhythm heard on a drum. Student success in aural tasks is not always consistent, and the student skill seems to fade over time if there is no…

The ways in which examination standards are conceptualised and operationalised differently across nations has not been given sufficient attention. The international literature on standard-setting has been dominated by the psychometrics tradition. Broader conceptualisations of examination standards have been discussed in the literature in England,…

This paper examines early school leaving from the perspective of parents of early school leavers in an inner-city local authority housing estate in the Republic of Ireland living with the challenges of significant marginalisation. While the vast majority of post-primary pupils now sit a Leaving Certificate examination, and improvements in school…

To understand the challenges associated with the enactment of educational policies that aim to improve equity and opportunity for students of color with disabilities, this chapter focuses on two separately conducted ethnographic studies. The first investigates district administrators' approaches to addressing racial disproportionality after the…

States are establishing high stakes assessments to serve as measurement tools of students' academic abilities. This study essentially compares Maryland's and Florida's mathematics and science assessments for similarities and differences. Building from 5-10 years of student level quantitative data (secondary data) and critical analyses of the…

This report provides information about the performance of Aboriginal students (including adults) in British Columbia's public schools. Ten sections include: (1) Introduction; (2) Student and District Context (Kindergarten-Grade 12), 2016/17-2020/21; (3) Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) Grades 4 and 7, 2016/17-2020/21; (4) Graduation Assessments…

We report results from our long-standing research partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. We make two primary contributions. First, we illustrate the wide range of informative analyses that can be conducted using a state longitudinal data system and the advantages of examining evidence from multiple…