With increasing competition for postgraduate research scholarships, awarding processes demand attention and scrutiny. We examine inter-rater reliability for two prestigious New Zealand scholarships, the Shirtcliffe Fellowship and the Gordon Watson Scholarship. For each scholarship, five assessors (three academic; two non-academic) independently…

A collaborative continuous professional (CPD) model was implemented and evaluated in six special schools in Gauteng, South Africa in order to support teachers in their professional capacity. The study which reports on a two year study aimed to establish the value of the CPD programme on teachers' learning, students' outcomes and whole school…

Improving the educational outcomes of economically disadvantaged children is a policy priority in the United States, and yet relatively little progress has been made in recent decades. Education reforms that aim to help economically disadvantaged students often focus on improving the quality with which grade-level material is taught, or the…

This report documents the second year of implementing Cycle-based Budgeting at Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville, KY). In addition to aligning another $24.3 million new spending with the district's strategic plan, $20.3 million of existing spending was rolled into the process. Next, the challenges faced by the district to review 105…

This report documents the first-year of implementing Cycle-based Budgeting at Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville, KY). To address the limitations of incremental budgeting and zero-based budgeting, a Cycle-based Budgeting model was developed and implemented in JCPS. Specifically, each new program needs to submit an on-line budget request…

The purpose of this researching study was to develop a teaching proposal and investigate the conceptualizations that children make about the processes of plants (photosynthesis, respiration, transpiration). We undertook an innovative implementation on teaching living things to students of 10 to 11 years old (5th grade). The theoretical framework…

The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with 16 member states to improve public pre-K-12 and higher education. Founded by the region's governors and legislators in 1948, SREB was America's first interstate compact for education. Today it is the only regional education compact that works…

"We want a grant for 20 computers." This was the author's directive from district administrators nearly 25 years ago. As a district grants specialist, she dutifully wrote the grant for computers so that the schools would be prepared for the 21st century. Back in the late 1980s, the computers themselves were the crux on the federal grant…

Early last week the U.S. Department of Education announced an unexpected 16 finalists for the first round of Race to the Top (RTT) funding--a veritable traffic jam in the Race to the Top. The finalists have requested a total of $6.5 billion in funds, but only $4.3 billion is up for grabs, and that needs to be spread over two rounds of competition.…

As peer reviewers for the U.S. Department of Education begin to comb through the thousands of pages of applications for $4 billion in federal Race to the Top Fund grants, they'll be under pressure to determine which are most worthy of funding: those that promise the most, or those with the best chance of delivering. In a competition whose criteria…

The Investing in Innovation (i3) program is a U.S. Department of Education competitive grant program supporting innovation in public schools. To encourage projects focusing on rural education in its first round of grants in 2010 the Department offered two bonus points in the scoring system for "projects that would implement innovative practices,…

Teachers' unions in at least two states are threatening to withhold endorsements of their states' Race to the Top applications, which could jeopardize the states' chances of winning the coveted federal dollars. In a letter printed as an advertisement in the Tallahassee Democrat, Florida Education Association President Andy J. Ford discouraged…

This article responds to recent UK proposals on measuring and recording student achievement (Universities UK 2007) to highlight issues that are relevant across different higher education contexts, which are increasingly intertwined through the expansion of the Bologna process. Drawing from wide-ranging literature on assessment and sociology, this…

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the finalists for the second round of the Race to the Top (RTT) competition, with the winners to be announced in September. Round one of the competition yielded just two awards earlier this year, with Delaware and Tennessee claiming approximately $600 million of the available funds. Thirty-five…

On September 8, 2011, the President proposed the American Jobs Act to Congress, including investments of $25 billion to renovate and modernize at least 35,000 of America's public schools; $5 billion to upgrade infrastructure at America's community colleges; and $30 billion to keep hundreds of thousands of educators in the classroom. This report…