Although some teacher educators hoped that the creation and use of standards would help to professionalize teaching, the discourse of standards and accountability is now being used to erode teacher education. Many teacher educators who anticipated the thrill of professionalization through standards are now experiencing the agony of deletes,…

Teachers in Ireland fear that benchmarking in the context of the present review of pay and conditions for all public service workers camouflages a shift of concern away from the development of the individual student to concern for the quality of the educational process provided by schools. A recent dispute between secondary teachers and the Irish…

The first decade of democracy in South Africa ushered in dramatic social policy reforms. One innovation in initial teacher education emerged through the skills development policy, which introduced learnerships to address South Africa's human resource development needs. South Africa's learnerships have been adapted from countries such as the United…

The locus of control in teacher education has been outside the hands of those who educate our nation's teachers for more than a century. Essentialists have long controlled the agenda for public schooling in America, and it is evident as well that their influence has prevailed in both the form and function of teacher education. The authors suggest…

Ethiopia is a nation of more than 70 million people characterized by diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Since the early 1990s Ethiopia has entered into the process of transformation towards a more civil society. This transformational process has led to numerous socioeconomic and political policy reforms. Central to reforms in the…

Certain conventions governing administrative, faculty, and student conduct have come through tradition and common sense to be accepted generally in academe. Obviously, they do things differently at different institutions. But when Professor Barbier carefully details the standards of pedagogy, privacy, and ethics she encountered at a Canadian…

Recent documents released by the U.S. Department of Education offer a negative characterization of Teacher Education. In a recent edition of "AACTE Briefs," Sharon Robinson (2005) points out the obvious: "teacher education has been the focus of high-profile and high-impact interest of policy makers for many years" (p. 2). Policy makers have cast…

This essay focuses on the formative years of the Citizenship Training Program as a Highlander project in the Charleston area. Informally known as Citizenship Schools, this adult education program began in 1958 under the sponsorship of Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, which handed over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in…

Current policy and programme considerations of the role of the private sector in the promotion of schooling reform and the achievement of Education For All encompass a somewhat narrow arena of debate. Discussion of the relative merits of private / state schools remain based on measurable, yet partial, markers of efficiency and effectiveness.…

Written by a prominent array of scholars and practitioners, this book elucidates the complexities, contradictions, and confusion surrounding adolescence in American culture and education. For too long, harmful public myths and lies have portrayed teenagers as a principal cause of our nation's social ills. Similar unfair charges have been lodged…

This article examines recent trends in childhood and youth policy, political socialization, and civic education in the USA and Canada since 2000. It examines some of the current trends (such as political socialization and education research findings on children and youth) as well as policy initiatives (such as the landmark federal legislation…

This paper offers a critical examination of an e-learning project in the context of a Distance Education training program delivered to teacher trainers in Rwanda. In examining the successes and failures of the project, it uses a framework based on ideas promulgated by Moore (1995) and strives to provide guidance and reference for future projects…

In the context of the increasing transfer of power from the federal government to state governments, this report analyzes existing data and offers critical information about state legislative higher education policy and insights into the values and attitudes legislators hold about higher education. The report's conclusions are based on a study…

After 40 years of efforts, the first bill authorizing the establishment of community colleges in the state of Ohio was finally adopted in June 1961. Before and after the passage of the act, attempts had been made to create a comprehensive community college system in Ohio, but all of them failed. A 1970 study by the Ohio Board of Regents (OBOR),…

It is proposed that a paradigm for training English-as-a-Second-Language teachers based on the educational philosophy of Paolo Freire would provide a more humanistic approach to the education of minority language groups. Freire's writings are reviewed, focusing on his plea for greater consciousness about the rights of others and the political…