A sizeable literature -- spanning education, sociology and economics -- has investigated the issue of parental school preferences and school choice. A notable gap in the existing evidence base is an exploration of how such preferences differ between mothers and fathers. We present new cross-national findings on this matter, drawing on survey data…

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 list top 1,000 universities in the world which represent only 5% of the 20,000 higher education institutions of the world. Out of these world countries, Finnish youth were the best young readers in the world according to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment…

Standardised International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have gained prominence in global and national educational discussions. ILSAs claim to offer valuable insights for improving education systems, but their impact on educational policy varies and has become a contested arena. This article analyses how these assessments fed educational…

This paper examines the problem of modernization of the national education model, based on the program documents "Mangilik El" and "Rukhani Zhangyru," the project "New humanitarian knowledge: 100 new textbooks in the Kazakh language," "Daryn" programs, etc., aimed at the spiritual development of the nation.…

Grade repetition is one of the bottlenecks to Uganda's vision of producing skilled human capital to transform the nation's status from peasant to middle class. This study explored how education stakeholders perceived the implication of students' grade repetition at a secondary school level. I employed a qualitative approach with an embedded…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess the contribution of primary schools within the metropolitan municipality of the province of Ankara, Turkey to the achievement outcomes of 7th grade students using the results of the end of year Level Determination Exam. Research Methods: Carried out using a casual comparative study framework, the…

This study examines the Finnish media debate surrounding the OECD-led PISA Study during the periods 2001-2009 and 2013-2014. The empirical focus of the study is on how debaters dissatisfied with Finnish education have justified their criticism in the context of debating PISA and how the justifications used have changed as Finland's PISA ranking…

State education rankings published by "U.S. News & World Report," "Education Week," and others are based partly on achievement tests, which measure student learning, and partly on other factors not directly related to student learning. These rankings are aggregated in a way that provide misleading results by: (1) ignoring…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) created the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a political actor in global education through a logic of governance by numbers (Grek, 2009). This article discusses how PISA has became a major showcase for the OECD as an assessment tool par excellence while also…

Special educational needs (SEN) can be seen as a 'construction' that countries define within their legislation and go on to identify, assess, and make provision for in different ways. Definitions vary widely from country to country and even within a country. Many governments have policies to ensure students with SEN are included in mainstream…

PISA, which was launched by OECD, is one of the most significant and successful initiatives on which education systems have recently collectively embarked. However, although it is a well-coordinated international programme, its reception differs according to country. There is therefore a need to analyse specific national circumstances in order to…

There is some disparity in the quality of education among the various races and provinces in South Africa. Since the dawn of democracy in 1994, the government has tried to bridge the gap using quintile categorisation of public schools and its concomitant funding. The categorisation is based on the socioeconomic status of the community in which the…

This study presents a conceptual and evidentiary study pertaining to the micro and macro level factors influencing the achievement gap among migrant children from a cross-national standpoint. First, this study provides the most systematic investigation of the immigrant educational paradox theory, which asserts that on average, immigrants'…

Despite entering higher education in good numbers, candidates from some black and minority ethnic groups are concentrated in less prestigious institutions. A similar pattern is evident in candidates' applications, raising important questions about the role of "self-exclusion". Statistical analysis confirms that candidates from some…

America is not Singapore and Singapore cannot be America. So why are we often comparing ourselves to high-performing countries based on international exams? Despite the educational crisis many U.S. schools are facing, Americans should be cautious not to mimic another country's model within our diverse classrooms. We are largely grounded on the…