School district consolidation enjoys a unique status among strategies to reduce education costs. It promises to cut spending, without lowering service quality, by improving the efficiency of service delivery. In contrast to strategies aimed at lowering employee salaries or benefits--which are hard to avoid when cutting spending in any labor…

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of change processes and dynamics at Catalan universities. A multidimensional approach was adopted to examine the change processes and to analyse organizational innovation in higher education. The paper draws involved in each particular innovation. Analysis of these…

Neoliberal and biopolitical ideologies have had an insidious impact on the field of teacher education, with disturbing implications for the future. Instead of "going along to get along," the field needs (1) critical analysis of the impact of neoliberalism and biopolitics on policies and practices of teacher education; (2) scholarship…

Education advocates are already bracing for protracted budget battles in the coming year, even as they sort the winners and losers in the bill approved by Congress late last week financing the U.S. Department of Education and the rest of the federal government through September. The hard-fought agreement followed months of wrangling between…

This article reports research into the nature and functioning of school governing bodies in different socio-economic and performance contexts. The research analysed 5000 responses from a national questionnaire-based survey and undertook 30 case studies of school governing. The research confirmed that school governing in England is a complex and…

Few studies have addressed the question how the two main linguistic groups in Belgium (French and Flemish speakers) code each other. The research reported in this article is based on a storytelling forum of 56 persons that gathered five times. The storytelling sessions yielded 91 different stories about living in a bilingual society. These were…

The academic study of religion at the public university often presents itself as a secular, non-religious, scientific endeavor. The identity of the study is thus firmly rooted within one of the central secular-religious divides, namely that between science and religion. Based on the assumption that such distinctions between religion and the…

Through surveys of students at Beijing University, Qinghua University, and other institutions, this article finds that today, twenty years after the political disturbance in 1989 and despite the long-term and unremitting efforts made by the Chinese government, China's college students still take a better view of the U.S. political system than they…

This article attempts to reconsider and re-evaluate the often misunderstood and mis-conceptualised notion of "progressivism" within education by examining it through the lens of intentionality, specifically the textual kind prescribed by Quentin Skinner in his seminal work "Visions of Politics" (2002). Locating and explicating his ideas will…

The field of Native American studies was invented during the 1960s, a product of the Red Power civil rights movement, which is to suggest that it shares an origin story with ethnic studies in general. The field was at the center of the ethnic studies movement, and it radically transformed how Native peoples and cultures were studied. The author…

While the need for humanising education is pressing in neoliberal societies, the conditions for its possibility in formal institutions have become particularly cramped. A constellation of factors--the strength of neoliberal ideologies, the corporatisation of universities, the conflation of human freedom with consumer satisfaction and a wider…

In order to shed light on the possibilities for using sport as a vehicle for the realization of social goods--understood as sport having a wider social role--this paper scrutinizes Norwegian sport clubs. The study is guided by the concept of convention, which refers to individuals' cognitive structures, and to social structure. Three sport clubs…

The author reports on the issue of bullying that rose on state legislative agendas this year, with 21 states passing anti-bullying laws--some of which expanded schools' responsibilities to keep a check on any harassment that goes on among students. States set out to write clear definitions of bullying and to regulate school policies and…

Recent debates within UK rural studies have stressed the shifting interplay of economic, social, political and cultural forces, with a concomitant blurring as to what constitutes rural living, rural spaces and even rural occupations. This article situates the rural school within this social, cultural and political landscape and attends to the…

The case for conversion to academy status is being made in a number of arenas, not least on the Department for Education website. As a matter of balance, school governors considering conversion need to take into account a range of factors. How does this fundamental shift in the ownership of schools fit into a discernible historical pattern?…