This article contributes to a growing body of research on global policy transfer and flows in education, arguing that a large number of such research has too often viewed nation-states as uniform policy containers, focusing mainly on national-level policy changes or using binary understandings of reform adaptation versus reform resistance.…

Participating in the Save Our School march was an inspiring event, the reverberating impact from which will be long-lasting. The march, which was endorsed by the Executive Board of Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI), was an effort to call awareness to the struggles that public education faces in the United States. The guiding…

This article argues that processes of disconnect and capture have affected Nepal's efforts to decentralise its education system, leading to a failure to engage the very stakeholders--parents and communities--that the reforms sought to reach. Specifically, disconnect occurred in the development and implementation of the latest…

The authors of this monograph assert that by assisting school systems to more closely resemble "high reliability" organizations (HROs) that already exist in other industries and benchmarking against top-performing education systems from around the globe, America's school systems can transform themselves from compliance-driven…

In the early years of the twenty-first century, being German has become a matter of linguistic competence and performance. An acute shift in citizenship statutes at the end of the 1990s brought about a peripatetic departure from Germany's "right of blood" ("ius sanguinis") toward a French-inspired "right of territory"…

During the past two decades, Taiwan's Ministry of Education has responded to globalization by restructuring school curricular, instructional, and decision making practices along western lines in an attempt to attain legitimacy on the world stage. As a result, Taiwanese principals, once kings within their schools, now must share power with other…

Historically, the progressive ideas of innovative schools have influenced the professional practice of North American educators since the latter part of the 19th century. Indeed, since the beginning of an industrial society, and now with the birth of globalization and a knowledge economy, there has been a need for public schools to sustain their…

The University of Botswana has not escaped the reform fever currently gripping higher education institutions the world-over. In the late 1980s the University initiated an administrative/management restructuring exercise whose resultant structure was implemented between 1998 and 2000. The exercise, in many respects, was a response to globalization.…

City leaders increasingly have hoped that school reform can spark a renaissance in struggling communities. Using the lens of building civic capacity, this article examines efforts to revitalize "Milltown"--a small urban community that has been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Analysis of interview and written documents identifies…

Globalization and the evolution of the knowledge-based economy have caused dramatic changes to the character and functions of higher education in most countries around the world. One major trend related to reforming and restructuring universities in Asia that has emerged is the adoption of strategies along the lines of the Anglo-Saxon paradigm in…

For more than a decade, the economic, social, political and cultural effects of globalisation have been central topics of debate. Those who see globalisation as a combination of economic transactions and worldwide telecommunications tend to believe that its impact is profound, inasmuch as it is fundamentally altering the way in which we live and…

A school's reengineering must first make sense to the leadership team before being sold to a skeptical faculty. The principalship's real power lies in persuasion. The Six "I" Framework, a model to help principals argue persuasively for change, is based on interdisciplinary instruction, integrated instructional targets and assessment practices,…

Discusses the synergistic interrelationships among the changes in our views of learning/teaching, the integration of technology, and the restructuring in our educational systems. Topics addressed include educational reform, constructivism, current use of technology, the effectiveness of technology, global telecommunications and collaboration, and…

For five years the major school reform agenda in America has been the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which was part of the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Now ESEA is up for another reauthorization by Congress, and everyone is wondering what is going to happen next. One could argue that there is…

This article provides both a critique and a more hopeful alternative to the current direction in school leadership. The central framing argument, written from an Australian perspective, is that dominant regimes of school leadership within current school reform approaches are failing because of their inability to listen to the voices of students…