While U.S. colleges and universities are still the top choice of foreign students, the American share of the international education market has shrunk from 40% in the 1980s to 32% today. Educators and government officials are working to develop a strategy for increasing U.S. competitiveness. Australia, Britain, and Canada, the three top…

A survey of 76 principals of twinned schools and 44 administrators of Ontario districts containing twinned schools provided baseline data about twinning, types of resource sharing, advantages and disadvantages, and suggestions for improvement. Commitment to twinning was not evident, and lack of a full-time principal was considered a disadvantage.…

Critiques a collection of articles on accountability, testing, and academics in schools with minority group and low-income students, examining their polar positions and explaining that polar positions are often equally biased. Expresses concerns about the TAAS, discussing what changes are needed in the educational system and the TAAS in order for…

Outlines the role of California policymakers as they work to shift the focus of educational reform from rules and processes to student achievement and accountability. Describes the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999, the most immediate and comprehensive of California's new laws. Shows how it defines fundamental questions of who should be…

Challenges a central orthodoxy of school-effectiveness work-that schools should strive to become more consistent learning environments. Ironically, the effective-school model has become embedded in the educational politics of the UK and USA, where conditions do not favor successful implementation. Educators must first address rampant socioeconomic…

Under a bill amending Ontario, Canada's Educational Accountability Act, teachers were expected to resume formerly "voluntary" extracurricular duties they resigned when ordered to teach an extra class. The government's strategy to recast these activities as "co-instructional" did not fly. However, the education minister is…

Finds that the reading performance of English-as-a-second-language students and English language learners immersed in regular education classes in a large urban school district was far below grade-level performance, across all categories of measurement; but that the performance of English language learners who had successfully exited from…

Examines the factors leading to the creation of Kentucky's Louisville Municipal College for Negroes and the black community's use of political power to achieve educational gains in the early decades of the 20th century. Three historical developments involving black education in Louisville are examined in order to better explain the college's…

An examination of the debate over affirmative action policies in higher education finds that increasingly, conservative black scholars are opposing continuation of affirmative action. In addition, the movement is gaining credibility through the activities of conservative academic groups such as the National Association of Scholars. These groups…

Discusses the influence of neoconservatism and neoliberalism on education and the importance of seeing schooling as fundamentally connected to the relations of domination and exploitation operative in the larger society, noting the need to recognize the changes that are occurring in many societies and to see the complexity of the power/knowledge…

Reviews the historical, social, and political context of women's experiences in science and math, challenging stereotypes that girls historically have had difficulties and suggesting that treating such difficulties as historical and personal in the absence of careful analyses of the social and political dimensions of women's experiences only…

Examines the evolution of deregulation as a state education policy strategy, from limited waiver programs to charter programs and new accountability systems that include broad deregulation. The article discusses the substantial political and practical barriers to broad deregulation despite the assumption that greater school-level autonomy will…

Examines the politics of year-round education in Brownfield, California, in the 1970s. Findings showed that Mexican Americans challenged the proposed 45-15 plan because they were excluded from the decision-making process and because the plan conflicted with migrant workers' employment patterns. Formal mechanisms must be activated to guard all…

Examines the successful efforts of a detracked urban middle school that attempted to simultaneously meet the requirements of both equity and educational excellence within a multicultural, racially mixed educational setting. Barriers and pitfalls of the program are discussed, as well as the links between heterogeneous grouping and multicultural…

The story of England's 1988 Education Reform Act is a sad account of a government's efforts to introduce educational innovations based on a political agenda. The result was teacher demoralization and at least 500 million pounds wasted on the national curriculum and its assessment. ERA's real aim was to encourage parental choice and open up…