Child care quality plays a crucial role in children's social and cognitive development. While child care quality is a critical issue for all children, it matters more for low-income children. Policy makers have increased the emphasis on allowing parents, not government, to make decisions about the type of care they want for their children. Yet…

Online education recently has been receiving a lot of attention at the K-12 level. Some may see it as a remedy for school budgets that are overstretched. Others view it as another means for reaching and teaching students and teachers, and some view online course delivery as an alternative educational choice. In fact, online education is simply…

This paper examines the implications for sustainability policy of environmental uncertainty and indeterminacy, and relates the associated problems with a conventional understanding of sustainable development to Hayek's critique of collective planning. It suggests that the appropriate recourse is not, however, a Hayekian endorsement of the free…

In this article, the author focuses on the issue involving zero tolerance in the Texas district whether the dress code policy is reasonable. In a small Texas school district, over 700 students were suspended in a single month for violating a zero-tolerance dress code policy. This suspension, which attracted national attention and threats of…

College substance use policies provide guidelines for student behavior and influence campus culture. Although they are the primary environmental strategy to address campus substance use, policies have not been systematically compared and studied. We constructed a systematic review method to examine the accessibility, comprehensiveness, enforcement…

Rural children and youth represent a substantial minority of U.S. students. The author of this commentary contends that the unique educational needs of rural communities have been largely ignored by the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) and that rural schools are treated as the "poor country cousins" of the U.S. education system.…

This article describes efforts from the mid-1990s in South Africa to reshape higher education curricula, and the responses of universities to a series of policy initiatives concerned with higher education curriculum reform. Pressures of globalisation and the local challenges of reconstruction and development formed the context in which higher…

This study focuses on isomorphic tendencies among programs in the emerging field of international education. The authors consider forces that may induce movement toward higher levels of homogeneity or isomorphism in both form and structure and examine international education in the context of systems in which programs are embedded. Institutional…

Policy, defined broadly to include public policy as well as institutional or organizational policy, is useful for sustaining change in human development and its contexts and systems. The role for developmental psychopathology research in policy analysis and policy making is discussed. To assure that developmental psychopathology research is useful…

This article reports on some of the data gathered for an Australian research project which investigated "What does the past tell us about adult literacy and numeracy policy, provision and practice?" First, the key national and some state policies which have informed program development in Australia will be outlined in order to highlight…

Parents are one of the most important influences in positive child and youth development, yet too many caregivers, especially those in higher risk families, fail to receive supports that would improve parenting and family functioning. By strengthening parent/caregivers and their connections to resources, communities can improve child and youth…

Aims: Schools have emerged as a key site for prevention and early intervention strategies for antisocial behaviour. This paper examines teacher perspectives of the scope within their day-to-day practice for the implementation of monitoring and management of student risk status for substance misuse. Methods: Teacher perspectives of early…

This paper focuses on transition programs for youth to postsecondary education, broadly considered. It addresses the following questions: (1) What models or programs of transition exist? (2) On what basis can we say one transition program is more effective than another? In other words, how is successful transition defined? (3) How are…

The number of students taking online courses in K-12 has increased exponentially since the inception of virtual schools in 1996. However, K-12 virtual schooling is a relatively new concept for those involved in teacher education. As teacher education departments build pre-service preparation programs, in-service professional development…

An interconnection of computer networks, telecommunications services, and applications, the National Information Infrastructure (NII) can open up new vistas and profoundly change much of American life. This report explores some of the opportunities and obstacles to the use of the NII by people and organizations. The goal is to express how…