In 2001, Clif Bar & Company, makers of LUNA: The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women, debuted LUNAFEST[R], an international touring film festival that showcases short narrative and documentary work of female filmmakers and raises money for the Breast Cancer Fund and other nonprofit women's organizations. A pre-packaged film festival with clear and easy…

This article has three primary goals centring on a re-examination of the research frameworks we use for understanding the politics of social movements. First, I detail the ideological and methodological deficiencies of the old social movement/new social movement framework. Second, I highlight the positive contributions of research that favoured or…

Little empirical attention has been paid to state capital expenditures for higher education. While some anecdotal evidence exists that the process of appropriating capital dollars to higher education institutions is a particularly political process, no study has systematically examined the determinants of higher education state capital spending.…

This article addresses the politics and policy-making of alternative forms of basic education in the context of EFA, with an emphasis on non-formal education (NFE) for school-age children. It explores how policy-makers interpret the relevance of such alternatives, the steps that are taken to implement the reforms and factors that play a role in…

Developments in school education in Australia over the past decade have witnessed the rise of national efforts to reform curriculum, assessment and reporting. Constitutionally the power to decide on curriculum matters still resides with the States. Higher stakes in assessment, brought about by national testing and international comparative…

This article examines the extent of neoliberalism's influence within US community colleges during the last decade. It argues that such influence is changing non-profit, publicly funded community colleges into consumer colleges, serving the needs of corporations and "customers" at the expense of civic responsibility. Educating 46% of all…

Using Kentucky as a case study, the research described in this paper examines efforts to provide equality of educational opportunity. Standards based educational reform has produced myriad data on student achievement that are used by educators, policy analysts, legislators, and researchers to discern progress. This research makes use of multiple…

In 2002, Brinckerhoff, McGuire, and Shaw observed that the field of postsecondary education and disability services had "moved through its adolescence and was embarking on adulthood" (xiii). Indeed, the field had undergone rapid expansion nationwide in the prior 30 years and grew into a full-fledged profession within higher education (Jarrow…

This article examines the ways in which education and educational policy impact upon the likelihood and dynamics of violent conflict. It argues that education is rarely directly implicated in the incidence of violent conflict but identifies three main mechanisms through which education can indirectly accentuate or mitigate the risk of conflict:…

A popular justification of education for autonomy is that autonomy possession has intrinsic prudential value. Communitarians have argued, however, that although autonomy may be a core element of a well-lived life in liberal societies, it cannot claim such a prudential pedigree in traditional societies in which the conception of a good life is…

The article reports on a study investigating influences on Australian politicians' decision making for early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy. The astronomical concept of dark matter is utilised as a metaphor for considering normalising, and therefore frequently difficult to detect and disrupt, influences implicated in politicians'…

This article addresses the diverging policies of England and Scotland since 1999 on the issue of tuition fees. While the UK Parliament has introduced (and henceforth enhanced the level of) tuition fees for students at English universities, the Scottish Parliament has refuted fees in two successive stages. In this article I trace the political…

Political leaders like to put forward guiding ideas or themes which pull their individual decisions into a broader narrative. For John Major it was Back to Basics, for Tony Blair it was the Third Way and for David Cameron it is the Big Society. While Mr. Blair relied on Lord Giddens to add intellectual weight to his idea, Mr. Cameron's legacy idea…

As a sociocultural educator and scholar, I have always been ambivalent about No Child Left Behind's slogan. I like its democratic ideal of "education without failure," but I do not like the current educational policies guided by a neoliberal ideology. This article begins a discussion about what a No Student Left Behind educational practice might…

Background: This study evaluated wellness policies created by Alabama public school districts and progress made in the implementation of Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) school food and nutrition mandates. Methods: Wellness policies from Alabama public school districts were compared to minimum requirements under the Child Nutrition…