At least one-third of the 72 million children currently missing out on primary education are estimated to be disabled. With just five years remaining to achieve the Millennium Development and Education for All (EFA) goals, global efforts to ensure all children complete a full cycle of primary education by 2015 will fail if bilateral and…

This article analyzes Vinicius de Moraes's "Patria minha" (1948) within the historical context of his first diplomatic post abroad. "Patria minha" was written while Moraes was stationed in Los Angeles as a Consul de Segunda Classe (Ministerio, "Moraes" 385). Moraes's poetic interpretations of Brazil often originated…

This case, set in the high plateau of the Texas Panhandle, covers the years 1998-2004. The focus is on voting rights. The Amarillo board members, like board members in most Texas districts, were elected at large. Faced with a voting rights lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the League of United Latin American…

In North American universities, pop culture increasingly appears in the German Studies classroom to "spice up" the curriculum. But what is conveyed and taught and how is it inserted into the curriculum and into the US cultural context? This article explores three examples of popular culture in the German Studies classroom:…

This paper provides an account and a critique of the rise of the contemporary policy as numbers phenomenon and considers its effects on policy and for educational research. Policy as numbers is located within the literatures on numbers in politics and the statistics/state relationship and, while recognising the longevity of the latter…

Policy debate about whether to maintain public subsidies for higher education has stimulated reconsideration of the public mission of higher education institutions, especially those that provide student places conferring private benefits. If the work of higher education institutions is defined simply as the aggregation of private interests, this…

As charter schools multiply, public school teachers and administrators need to understand the policy landscape in which charters are skimming money from their traditional local public schools, making scarce resources even scarcer. In this essay, the author discusses a related phenomenon that is part of some school reform plans--the reconstitution…

The objective of this article is to critically examine a school reform effort that has taken hold in New York City over the past seven years. A largely privately funded venture, the New Century Schools Initiative (NCSI), opened hundreds of new small high schools in poor urban communities in New York City starting in 2002. The theory behind opening…

This essay looks at the representation of disability in the recent Spanish film "Yo, tambien" through the lens of disability studies, understood as a political project. The film's portrayal of a character who is, like the actor who plays him, Europe's first university graduate with Down syndrome, is unique. Moreover, "Yo,…

This paper compares four short- and medium-term strategies available to public higher education to balance budgets in the face of major cutbacks in public funding. These strategies include: capping enrolments, changing the enrolment mix, raising prices and increasing enrolments without raising prices. The paper assesses the likely effects of these…

This paper grabs hold of the "assessment tiger" by considering the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) "Arts Report Cards" for the visual arts, which were constructed and have been administered four times within thirty-five years. Two purposes of the NAEP have persisted since its founding: (1)…

The second part of this account of struggles over literacy begins in the later seventeenth century. From the 1670s, the new dissenting academies, backed by rising business classes, made teaching in English for a wider curriculum their goal. Thus was Defoe's mastery of a new spoken style developed, while in Scotland, the eighteenth century…

Since the 1940s, the concept of community participation has framed, mobilized, and legitimated national development agendas in the Singida Region of rural central Tanzania. Based on 19 months of ethnographic and archival research, this study examines the forms of community participation elicited through state and international development…

This paper is a reading of the "Free Primary Education" (FPE) policy in Kenya through the lenses of critical theory/pedagogy. The study critiques the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (NARC) government for adoption of the Freirian banking model to design and implement the policy. The paper argues that such a model has ended up…

Over the past two decades, state governments have increasingly invested in programs to recruit accomplished scientists from elsewhere to university positions. This event history analysis suggests that an intriguing mix of comparative state disadvantage and leveragable existing research resources is associated with the likelihood of states adopting…