"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Alliance for Excellent Education Announces New Center for Secondary School Digital Learning and Policy: Center's Work…

This article discusses the recent changes to the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA), P.L. 110-315, which have resulted in providing greater access to college programs to students with intellectual disabilities (ID). Prior to the amendments to HEOA, only students who were enrolled full time in a degree bearing program were eligible to…

Although Germany has experienced net in-migration for the past five decades, this fact has only recently been officially acknowledged. Furthermore, Germany is marked by a general monolingual self-concept very much attached to the idea of a nation-state with one homogeneous language. However, in large urban areas of Germany about 35 per cent of the…

In 2011, three years on from the Apology given by Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd to the Stolen Generations and coupled with the Federal Governments agenda to "close the gap" in education for Aboriginal students, perhaps it is time to retrospectively look at the issues and challenges that have moulded the terrain of Aboriginal education in…

This study examines how public debate can shape school district policy. Using qualitative methods and an interdisciplinary framework that weaves an interpretive approach to policy implementation with the language policy and planning literature, the analysis demonstrates that immigrant voices were mostly absent in a debate over a new dual-language…

In the Andes, a phonological transference known as "motoseo" has acquired ideological weight. People think that bilingual speakers of Quechua and Spanish "confuse" the vowels when speaking Spanish and that they are inferior to the ones who do not. In this article, I analyze the ideological agenda of the racialized verbal…

In Myanmar schools, rote learning is the norm. International aid and education organisations based in the country have been trying to promote the child centred approach (CCA) as a much more progressive form of teaching and learning. The CCA is being rolled out principally through monastic school networks aided by international and national…

In the spring of 2008, the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat of the Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada released a DVD that was one in a series designed to train literacy teachers in what the Ministry referred to as "high-yield" comprehension strategies. Using the lens of Critical Race Theory, this article analyses the picture book…

In the international context, the quality of public primary education in Indonesia is sub-standard. The assumption of officials at all levels of government is that a significant increase in funding will be required to improve education performance. The analysis in this paper shows that money does indeed matter for the attainment of primary…

Our field is ushering in a new generation of teachers who need experiences that will prepare them to acknowledge the multiple worldviews of the diverse student population they will teach. For pre-service teachers working in urban under-resourced classrooms, constructing alternative practices rooted in critical ideology that honors their students'…

In early 2009, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the federal government's nearly $800 billion stimulus legislation. According to key members of Congress and the Obama administration, the education portions of the law, totaling about $100 billion, were designed both to…

This paper explores the notions of globalization as embodied in Japanese educational reforms during the 1980s and 1990s. Modern institutional discourses of educational reform in Japan have shifted over time and all of these reform movements have been constructed by particular social and historical trajectories. Generally speaking, it has been…

Privatization is one of the main global trends in higher education. Aspects of privatization include the development and expansion of private institutions, increased reliance of public institutions on private funding, and the operation of the institutions in a businesslike manner. The rapid spread of privatization in higher education systems of…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Senate Committee Passes Education Appropriations Bill; (2) Upside Down: New Alliance Brief Says Federal Education…

Humorist Josh Billings quipped, "About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment." Billings was harsh in his view of originality, but his critique reveals a tension faced by students every time they write a history paper. Research is the essence of any history paper. Especially in high school,…