The Code of Practice of the Department for Education (1994) establishes the role of special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) to help facilitate the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools. SENCOs, thus, should form an integral part of the culture of all departments, including physical education (PE).…

The Administration's January proposal for the 2014-15 state budget projects a surplus, due to painful budget cutting in recent years combined with the economic recovery and voter approval of new revenues. While the proposal invests some of the additional revenue in children, it falls well short of what is needed. California's kids have borne a…

State education agencies, or SEAs, are being asked-and in some cases, forced-to make operational changes in the name of school improvement. New laws and expectations are pushing them to play a greater role in managing school performance, displacing to a significant degree their decades-old responsibility for monitoring local school districts for…

With significant shifts in education, states are recognizing that students were not being taught at levels that adequately prepared them for college and careers and stepped up to develop and implement more rigorous standards. As part of this transition, states have also committed to better supports for educators to adapt to the new standards,…

This paper explores what happens to similar groups of children educated in different school districts. In this case, the "twins" in the study are groups of students who live in the same state in similar geographies and who share certain demographic characteristics. For this report, "twin districts" have very similar sizes and…

Across the nation, large urban school districts are experiencing premature and rapidly accelerating deterioration of school buildings. The conditions of buildings and equipment, most importantly in classrooms and school support spaces, are deteriorating to the point of hindering the core mission of schools: educating children. This report is the…

The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 (Perkins IV), signed into law on August 12, 2006, lays out the statutory requirements governing federal support for career and technical education (CTE) services offered within secondary schools and postsecondary institutions throughout the United States. Aimed at more fully developing…

The Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education provides funding and priority recommendations for the Nebraska State College's, the University of Nebraska's and the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture at Curtis' capital construction requests, as outlined in Nebraska's Constitution and Statutes. The overarching principle used in this…

To promote attainment and inclusion, Sweden offers tuition in migrant pupils' mother tongues as a regular school subject. However, the formulation of learning aims is problematic, and resources allocated to the subject do not correspond to ambitions expressed in steering documents. This case study presents an analysis of the organization of Mother…

Purpose: This exploratory research project aims to seek an effective process for identifying supervisors of part-time student employees who also serve in a mentoring capacity. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on a review of literature and an evaluation process focused on established traits and functions of mentoring as applied to…

It has been three years since Race to the Top grant-winning states piloted new teacher evaluation systems and many of them have made considerable progress, yet according to media coverage and a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in April 2015, struggles remain and most grantees have asked to extend the timetables for…

General economic uncertainty and ongoing issues with information technology (IT) funding in higher education are impacting the general availability and allocation of funds to community colleges and, subsequently, to IT. However, financial support for IT is not always just about money: how much and to whom, from what source for what purpose. Other…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the performance appraisal (PA) aspects that are connected with organizational justice, and more specifically three kinds of justice, namely distributive, procedural and interactional justice. Design/methodology/approach: The research is based on a sample of 170 respondents who answered a questionnaire giving…

Previous research on feedback frequency suggests that more frequent feedback improves learning and task performance (Salmoni, Schmidt, & Walter, 1984). Drawing from resource allocation theory (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989), we challenge the "more is better" assumption and propose that frequent feedback can overwhelm an individual's cognitive resource…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework that serves as a guide to develop a curriculum and instructional strategy that is systems oriented and student-centric. Design/methodology/approach: The framework is based on the theories in the field of education by prominent researchers. The framework is divided into four sub-systems,…