Communicating through the internet has quickly evolved from email, listservs, discussion boards, instant messaging, blogging and now to podcasting. Many of these communication tools have been exploited by the educational community and the latter appears to be no exception. This paper will share background on blogs and podcasts as well as…

Leadership is critical to educational development and specific preparation is vital if leaders are to maximise their effectiveness. In this major new text, Tony Bush draws on his extensive international experience and research to examine the case for leadership development and assess the different modes of preparation used in Europe, including the…

This issue of The Progress of Education Reform addresses the policies and practices associated with sustaining school readiness and boosting achievement for young children throughout the early elementary years. All three studies support the notion that an aligned and coordinated set of policies and practices linking early learning with the early…

Based on the quantitative research and comparative study method, this paper attempts to make a systematic study and analysis of regional differences which have existed since 1949 in higher education among East, Middle and West China. The study is intended to explore the causes, regional differences, social changes, and their co-related…

This text is a guide to the reading and interpretation of the "good practices" that are developing in the countries participating in this project and elsewhere. A systematic approach to the factors making up a "good practice" has enabled us to share our analyses in a more structured manner and to reflect on their potential for…

We studied the effects of academic performance, motivation, and social connectedness on third-year retention, transfer, and dropout behavior. To accommodate the three outcome categories and nesting of data within institutions, we fit a hierarchical multinomial logistic regression path model with first-year academic performance as a mediating…

This paper examines the availability and adequacy of schools' infrastructural facilities for implementation of the Universal Basic Education program in Nigeria. Adopting the "ex post facto" design, the researchers used existing school data on physical facilities, including a survey of key stakeholders in the education sector. Data…

The concept of City Academies owes much to the plan for a network of City Technology Colleges announced by Conservative Education Secretary Kenneth Baker in 1986. This article argues that all this can be viewed as part of the inroad of business into state education, with private sponsorship seen by government as the magical solution to the…

Of all Tony Blair's education policies during his decade as prime minister, one of the most controversial was his plan to create a network of academies--effectively, private schools funded by the taxpayer. This piece explores the origins of the policy and recounts the widespread concerns and criticisms with which it has been beset.

This paper examines the meta-theoretical status, basic determinants, interests, conditions and directives of theory development in contemporary intercultural education (IE). It identifies functions and main objectives of IE at the macro-, mezzo- and micro-levels of society, interdisciplinary approaches associated with the discipline, as well as…

In his article, Steven Klees claims that certain economic policies have been a failure in general and specifically in education. He has it backwards. His characterisation of the economics profession has not been true since the 1960s. Nobel Prizes to Simon, Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz illustrate a flowering of ideas in fields of behaviourial and…

The paper attempts to provide relevant data on the achievements, albeit quantitatively, of the National Correspondence Institute of Tanzania over the past 30 years as a case study in distance education innovation. The case-study data reveal reasons for the near collapse of the distance education programme during the 1990s, and the renewed policy…

There have been various published histories of Australasian universities but none as rich as the two most recent relating to the universities of Sydney (1991) and Melbourne (2003). The latter, in particular, was the catalyst for this exploratory study. How was it that at a time when many major British cities lacked a university institution, towns…

The field of teacher education is border and boundary rich. Navigating and attempting to confront the seemingly intractable boundaries between schools and universities, and between research and teacher education goes with the territory. Schools and teacher education may share the broad goal of improved educational outcomes for all students, but…

This report discusses the progress of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) evaluation and presents a brief summary of the main findings of the seven distinct topical reports that have been completed for 2007-08--the second year of the evaluation. Those seven specialized reports build on the five reports that were released in 2008 and are:…