If there is one thing that describes the trajectory of American education, it is this: more high-stakes testing. In the United States, the debates surrounding this trajectory can be so fierce that it feels like we are in uncharted waters. As Christopher Bjork reminds us in this study, however, we are not the first to make testing so central to education: Japan has been doing it for decades. Drawing on Japan’s experiences with testing, overtesting, and recent reforms to relax educational pr...

Indonesian Education: Teachers, Schools, and Central**Authority, the first published study of life inside Indonesian schools, explores the role that classroom teachers' behavior and locates their actions within the broader cultures of education and government in Indonesia.

Taking Teaching Seriously expands and enriches discussions about teacher preparation in the United States. Its authors describe the unique contexts for teacher preparation offered by liberal arts institutions and analyze the effects of these programs on their graduates and on K12 schools. They emphasize that the goals and conditions for teacher preparation differ from larger public institutions in several key respects including supervisor-student teacher relationships, philosophic...

This volume documents the significant changes that have occurred in Japanese schools since the collapse of that nation’s economic bubble. Before the recession, Japan was the country that most educational reformers sought to emulate due to its students’ performance on standardized tests. Now, however, a different and more complicated picture of the Japanese education system emerges. This book places Japanese education in a global context, with particular attention given to how t...