When the drive to develop and administer tests comes from a public call for accountability in a profession, from the government's response to this call, or from politicians attempting to identify a hot issue, it may be said that the test must first have political validity in order to be implemented. Only after this political validity has been…

Examines Zimbabwe's 1980-87 teacher education reform designed to change its educational system. The paper appraises dilemmas encountered by the Ministries of Education and teachers' colleges responsible for implementation, noting that struggles in Zimbabwe's political economy are dialectically related to contestations in the teacher education…

The five commissioned papers in this anthology provided part of the research base for the national report, "National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent." In the first paper, "The Performance of High Ability Students in the United States on National and International Tests," Carolyn Callahan describes…