Despite Italy's extensive participation in most large-scale assessments, their actual influence on Italian educational policies is less easy to identify. The present contribution aims at highlighting and explaining reasons for the weak and often inconsistent relationship between international surveys and policy-making processes in Italy.…

Despite considerable research and discussion regarding children and young people's rights and citizenship, the participation of young children in community decision-making is still limited. In this exploratory research, a case study is reported on how ideas about young children as active citizens are interpreted within one local government…

Scholars have called for the articulation of new frameworks in special education that are responsive to culture and context and that address the limitations of medical and social models of disability. In this article, we advance a theoretical and practical framework for inclusive education based on the integration of a model of relational…

Despite marked improvements, intervention for students with a mental health problem or illness in Canadian higher education settings remains not yet successful, mature, or sustainable. A number of challenges have been identified as contributory to the shortcomings surrounding student mental health in colleges and universities. In this paper, I…

The article deals with the problem of forming social partnership policy in vocational training of service sector specialists in Germany and Austria. The foreign and domestic pedagogical experience in establishing an effective system of social partnership in vocational education has been analyzed. The author has considered main factors of social…

This article articulates a framework suitable for use when making decisions about education policy. Decision makers should establish what the feasible options are and evaluate them in terms of their contribution to the development, and distribution, of educational goods in children, balanced against the negative effect of policies on important…

The issue of college completion has become a hot-button topic for higher education and the public in recent years. While completion is not a new issue, several national and state-level efforts, including President Obama's 2020 college-completion goal to increase the number of college graduates to 50 percent of the population, have brought…

Borrowing the lens of Finnish education policymakers, this article aims at dissecting the Finnish conception of inclusion and its approach in constructing an inclusive "special" education system as set against the wider debates and practices that shed different lights on the meaning and viability of inclusion. The discussion explores the…

This backgrounder details the scope of the following critical forum concerning Texas House Bill 51 (TX HB 51) of the 81st Legislature, also referred to as the emerging research university bill. In its totality the journal issue considers the impact of TX HB 51 on the organizational behavior of comprehensive regional institutions in the state of…

Policy enactment is a dynamic process, which invites agents to uniquely create and recreate policy as an ongoing process. Few policies arrive in school fully formed and the process of policy enactment involves teachers navigating policy frameworks in a way that provides success for each individual pupil. This research examines the complexities…

Policymakers and educational leaders continue to use school district decentralization as a reform effort that attempts to shift power and authority from central office administration to school-level leadership. In 2015, the Nevada Legislature passed legislation to restructure the Clark County School District (CCSD), the state's largest school…

The literature indicates faculty members' beliefs and attitudes toward assessment are crucial to the successful implementation of assessment. However, few empirical studies have examined the culture of assessment among faculty members. The intent of this single-level mixed methods case study is to identify the factors and examine how these factors…

The article highlights recent food policies in Chicago with the goal of exploring how higher education institutions can contribute to development of sustainable food resources for residents of North American cities. Thousands of Chicago residents face daily challenges accessing fresh food due to income constraints and/or lack of proximity to food…

The field of early childhood education is increasingly dominated by a strongly positivistic and regulatory discourse, the story of quality and high returns, which has spread from its local origins in the favourable environment provided by a global regime of neoliberalism. But though dominant, this is not the only discourse in early childhood…

A barrage of pro-privatization policies that cascaded into North Carolina education statutes during the 2013-2014 legislative session helped spark a series of organized protests known as the Moral Monday Movement. Powerful and strategic policy networks, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have made privatization and…