Reexamines Callahan's book, "Education and the Cult of Efficiency" (1962), and his vulnerability thesis regarding school superintendents, discussing recommendations it made and highlighting public education in the 1990s. Callahan's recommendations were well-received but not well-heeded, and the vulnerability thesis did not provide the…

A 1998 randomized survey of American Association of School Personnel Administrators indicated that inadequate funding and employee salaries are big issues; teacher and administrator shortages will probably continue; special-education and technology teachers are most needed; and certain publics (school boards, legislatures, and business) are most…

The model currently guiding educational policy development--constructing crises and crafting solutions--has a long, unproductive history. To shrug off American education's perpetual crisis mode, educators should expand their descriptive vocabularies, apply the "so what" test, adopt demonstrably effective solutions, eschew a crisis…

Describes how the Arizona Department of Education's rush to implement the AIMS (Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards) high school graduation exam provoked justifiable protest from parents, students, school officials, and education experts in the state. Argues that, if critics and advocates are unable to work together, it will be Arizona's…

A principal who headed various Tasmanian schools observes the prevalence of micropolitics and describes the micropolitics involved in an assisted self-renewal process. Greater attention to fact through research and data collection, more intentional communication strategies, shared decision making, and greater understanding of micropolitics will…

Considers a case of corporate involvement in education by tracing an employability-skills profile from its development by a corporate-sponsored group through local implementation. Shows the processes and strategies adopted by business leaders, and critiques the discourse of employability skills by indicating what is left out or obscured. (DSK)

Calls attention to the difficulties of broaching issues of "race" and "sex" in the classroom context of nationwide calls for multiculturalism. Discusses the current politics surrounding the importance of student course evaluations, and presents strategies for making evaluations more useful in the context of courses that include controversial…

Discusses teacher education in Brazil and the recent proposals to reform existing programs by the current Brazilian government, arguing that recent reforms function as resources for economic growth and that a tension between mechanisms to make the educational process more flexible and instruments to control and evaluate its products underlines the…

Interviews with 45 key informants involved in development of Britain's National Vocational Qualifications attributed failure to achieve better implementation to institutional constraints: political imperative to manage high youth unemployment, inadequate accountability and supervision, lack of mechanisms to compel implementation, and weakness of…

Articulates "romantic intellectualism" of what graduate work in English might mean and be. Avoids giving a detailed description of a doctoral program. Intends to convey something that might best be called visioning or dreamwork, and offers it in the hope that it may be helpful to others in their individual and collective visioning and dreaming.…

To understand how the political dynamics of state bond elections could affect education funding, this study analyzed factors influencing voter support on all 319 state ballot initiatives or referenda to authorize debt for a specific government function from 1978 to 1990. Voter support for education debt is generally high. (34 footnotes) (MLH)

Argues that the "failure" of traditional writing instruction is actually its success, protecting the elite and maintaining inequality, which requires mass failure and illiteracy to preserve the unequal hierarchies now in place. Argues that bogus testing should be eliminated, basic writing mainstreamed into an expanded and untracked form of…

Interviewed staff in two Australian universities about sacrifices they had to make to do their jobs, using the greedy institution concept to describe the hold the universities had over their staff. Overall, there was a certain uniformity of response across sites, gender, and occupational status, which is the product of a masculinist discourse used…

Explores reorganization of secondary education in a small British town. Conceptualizes six headteachers and the education director as social players engaged in seven transactional game situations during reorganization, showing how political changes that transformed the public-sector education provision also created conditions conducive to…

Discusses evolutionary stages in the education establishment's reaction to charter schools: stopping them cold, keeping them few and weak, competing with them, and accepting and using them. Charters are not revolutionary. They embody three time-tested features: community rootedness; resemblance to magnet and alternative schools; and institutional…