Given the current economic constraints facing the country, school districts in the U.S. have been pushed to develop annual budgets through a new lens and to accept the reality that budget adoption is a complex, political process. Whether a school district is rich or poor, growing or declining in enrollment, serving a specialized population or…

In 1997, the Government of Sri Lanka launched a comprehensive set of education reforms designed to promote equitable access to basic education and improvements in learning outcomes. The package of reforms arose as a political response to widespread youth unrest in the late 1980s and attracted considerable "political will", a vague but…

Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning have the potential to influence educational policy and practice in profound ways for the systems that are courageous enough to take them seriously, and the Data standard is a critical element systemwide. Schools are overwhelmed with data warehouses, colorful charts and graphs, and endless…

The evolution in Europe towards more competence-based curricula in the last ten years or so is the result of several exogenous factors and a determined European policy. The Reference Framework of Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, a Recommendation approved by the European Parliament and the Council in 2006, and the work carried out within the…

This article outlines policies from multilateral organisations that advocate sharing best practices between developing nations. The article discusses the degree to which these best practices are implemented by small states as indicated by teachers, academics and policymakers in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. For the purpose of this article, a…

Hong Kong is traditionally an examination-oriented culture, a legacy of its Confucian heritage. Since the 1990s, the Hong Kong government has shown its determination to make a change to this deep-rooted examination-oriented culture with assessment for learning highlighted as an important aspect in the reform agenda. Although many initiatives have…

For many years, there have been efforts to promote the development of national standards for education in the United States. In the Spring of 2010, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) completed a project to develop Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Leading education organizations, such…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a concept of knowledge among the campus chiefs and other university leaders to make them aware of how important knowledge management (KM) is to achieve quality education criteria. Design/methodology/approach: The approach of the article is basically conceptual and descriptive. The article was…

This paper discusses the challenge of making large-scale improvements in literacy in schools across an entire education system. Despite growing interest and rhetoric, there are very few examples of sustained, large-scale change efforts around school-age literacy. The paper reviews 2 instances of such efforts, in England and Ontario. After…

This case study presents data to support the notion that turnaround school policy can improve the efficiency of how traditionally low-performing schools function. The schools that were successful in implementing the UVA Turnaround Program training developed a clear understanding of the expectations for participating in the UVA Turnaround Program…

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a federal program to provide additional assistance to academically struggling students in high-poverty areas, has long contained a provision called the "supplement-not-supplant" requirement. This provision was designed to ensure Title I funds were spent on extra educational services…

Whether and to what extent we are in the process of reconstructing higher education following the Bologna Process orientation is the issue underpinning this article. To address this issue, the authors consider data from an exploratory survey conducted in a Portuguese university, focusing on the field of education. They take into account the…

The objective of this study was to analyze first-year UFRJ medical students' perceptions about the implementation of a blended learning (BL) experience in their Biochemistry I course. During the first semester of 2009, three Biochemistry professors used the Constructore course management system to develop virtual learning environments (VLEs) for…

This article proposes an applied theoretical framework that could assist education reformers in Confucian heritage culture (CHC) countries to adopt Western-developed learning practices successfully. This framework is needed because the literature has recently documented a large number of failures in educational reforms at CHC colleges. The main…

The purpose of this research was to determine how teachers and administrators in a successful North Carolina district perceived the purpose and value of a school improvement plan (SIP) and the planning process. The SIP is the accepted best practice for school-wide improvement, and the perceptions of the purpose and value of the process…