Amid the growth of charter schools, autonomous schools, and private management organizations, an increasing number of urban districts are moving toward a portfolio management model (PMM). In a PMM, the district central office oversees schools that operate under a variety of governance models. The expansion of PMMs raises questions about local…

Jamestown is at the heart of any teaching and learning of colonial American history. Stories of John Smith and Pocahontas are learned by elementary and secondary students across the United States. In Virginia, Jamestown is first taught in third grade and revisited five more times from historical, political, economic, and geographic perspectives.…

This research engaged with how secondary schools in Christchurch framed sustainability through web based interfaces. The key focus of the research was how schools are engaging students in sustainability through their web-site messaging. While some research has been done around whole-school approaches to sustainability, no research has been done…

In this article the role of comparative studies of music education within the globalized world is discussed by looking at a particular initiative in the general education field called "Didaktik and/or curriculum." By drawing on the characteristics and issues of this particular initiative, as well as on some critical perspectives that…

During recent years, we have seen an increase in the complexity of school leadership as knowledge work. The new forms of knowledge available to school leadership, such as performance data and survey-based data, raise the expectation that leaders make relevant use of these knowledge resources. Theory and policy claim that new knowledge is of…

In this article we present and discuss experiences developed through a dialogue conference which we organised as part of a three-year participatory action research project related to primary education and agricultural education in Tanzania. We explore how dialogue conference as a research method can fill a gap between traditional ways of mutual…

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has been the catalyst for countless national policies around the world which focus on increased participation of individuals with disabilities in educational and community settings. Despite these national and international policies, most children with disabilities in developing…

In the years since Samoan independence in 1962, and especially over the past 2 decades, the landscape of education aid to the Pacific Island nation of Samoa has changed dramatically as a result of ongoing geopolitical shifts and emerging global designs. Some of these include: rapid globalization across all spheres of human activity; the economic…

In an era of globalization, multifaceted and complex changes have increasingly interconnected geographically dispersed places. A central question of globalization studies concerns whether top-down forces of globalization are forging a global culture or whether processes of globalization from below are able to push back against homogenization by…

In this chapter, the authors explore various types of cross-border higher education, considering equity and quality issues within these developments. With a particular focus on international branch campuses, the authors discuss the ways in which global competition for knowledge and economic development interact with tensions at the local level.

The aim of the study was to determine if Chinese school principals use influence actions differently from US principals. The concepts framing this study are leader influence actions, societal and local culture. The analysis was conducted with data from two independent studies conducted in each country using the strategic leadership questionnaire…

In recent years, Teach for America (TFA) has invested in developing corps members as leaders. Although TFA asks corps members for a two-year commitment, TFA celebrates the achievements of alumni who have gone on to careers in politics, public policy, and advocacy. Thus, many community leaders see the arrival of TFA corps members as having a…

While the teacher shortage is a national crisis, the manifestations of the shortage are felt most acutely at the local district level. The diversity of these micro-contexts often leads to disparities in the ways local school systems are served by large-scale initiatives. District leaders provide an important lens for understanding the localized…

This paper overviews some of the domains of application of micro-level language planning approaches to foster multilingual education. It examines the language planning of local agents and the contexts in which their work contributes to multilingual education, either to expand or limit educational possibilities. It identifies four broad contexts of…

This article describes how one local teachers' union branch has developed an active and imaginative campaign as it has challenged both national education policy and also the very specific attacks on schools in the community. By connecting local and national issues, and by linking struggles on pay and pensions to wider questions of policy, the…