Over the last several hundred years, local and national educational systems have evolved from relatively simple systems to incredibly complex, interdependent, policy-laden structures, to which many question their value, effectiveness, and direction they are headed. System Dynamics is a field of analysis used to guide policy and system design in…

The implementation of quality assurance (QA) is one of the most challenging reform areas for Turkey due to the unique organization of its higher education system. This paper explores the development of QA systems in Turkish universities. Using a qualitative case study approach, the authors examine how Turkey accomplishes the goal of implementing…

Since the break up of the USSR, its former republics have seen the emergence and rapid expansion of an examinations industry that was, to all intents and purposes, unknown in Soviet times. New national assessment agencies have been established and been charged with, amongst other things, developing high-stakes exams to replace the diverse and…

In an effort to analyze what management policies and technologies from other disciplines can be applied to the field of education, this report describes the development of an analytical framework and its use to explore implications for policy development. The present work seeks to synthesize the available literature on management policies and to…

The system approach to planning and managing educational change features the use of an adaptive framework and a strategy for planned system change. The approach focuses management attention upon (1) relevant future states of expectations or goals, (2) present and future state variables and contexts, (3) human organization factors, and (4)…

I synthesize some of the lessons we have learned about systemic school reform in order and derive two explicit hypotheses about when such reforms are likely to be more and less successful. The first hypothesis focuses on program implementation: to achieve success, any systemic reform must overcome challenges at each stage of the policy-making…