This book addresses the complex phenomenon in higher education of structural reforms in higher education systems. Across the globe, governments initiate comprehensive reforms of their higher education systems because they want their models to be the best and to excel at what they do. This regularly requires governments to change the higher education landscape to achieve their set objectives. Changes can include merger processes, the introduction of a new sector of higher education or a new...

In light of an increasingly tumultuous political landscape, the success, efficiency, and performance of government employees and departments is more critical than ever before. With over thirty years of experience working for the federal government, author Stewart Liff shares firsthand knowledge about the key to improving a government team’s performance results: understanding how different management systems perform individually and interact with one another. Improving the Performance of Go...

How well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word “American”? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history — and questions that were addressed when, in 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Although the immediate context of the FWP was work relief, national FWP officials developed programs that spoke ...

Something is badly, badly wrong with transportation in Toronto. Just riding public transit provides evidence of that, along with a pain in the neck.  Torontonians still love the TTC, but just wish it would shape up, and are painfully aware it hasn't been world-class for at least a generation. The author, no specialist in any of the relevant areas of research, brings his skills as an academic and the righteous indignation of a TTC rider to the task of telling just how bad things a...

Provides a provocative examination of the interplay between political culture and educational policy. The goal is to provide a better understanding of how different countries are responding to the global exchange of policy ideas that includes 'the standards movement' and 'new public management' or accountability in the public sector.

The steady accretion of public policies over the decades has fundamentally changed how America is governed. The formulation and delivery of policy have emerged as the government’s entire raison d’être, redefining rights and reconfiguring institutional structures. The Policy State looks closely at this massive unnoticed fact of modern politics and addresses the controversies swirling around it. Government has become more responsive and inclusive, but the shift has also pol...

This book sets out political economy explanations for higher education policy reform in Europe in the initial decades of the 21st century. With a sustained focus on the national level of policy implementation, institutional change is considered in relationship to broader trends in economic development and globalization. Since the concept of a “Europe of Knowledge” was presented by the European Commission in 1997, the pursuit of global competitiveness sets the context for the international ...

Drawing on discussions of the "Creative Economy," the "Network Economy," and the "Green Economy," Rethinking US Education Policy critiques educational policies authored by the Obama administration and considers the need for a new educational policy framework that is better adapted to an era of accelerating innovation.

This book investigates the interrelationship between educational reforms and pedagogical and technological innovations, as well as the implications of this relationship for the quality of human capital. By analyzing recent educational reforms in Russia and the US, the authors shed new light on how these reforms may help or hinder innovations, such as the introduction of computer technologies into classrooms, new methods of teacher evaluation, constructivist teaching methods, and governance...

This groundbreaking work examines teacher quality, work norms, and professional learning opportunities, using data from 15 countries. The authors compare and contrast the United States with two high-achieving countries—Japan and Australia—that have implemented very different approaches to improving teacher quality. Drawing on both large international data sets and ethnographic and small-scale studies, the book addresses critical questions: How ...

This book explores the impact of Bangladesh's Local Government Act of 2009 on the functioning of the local governments or Union Parishads (UP), with a particular emphasis on people’s participation and accountability. Throughout the chapters, the authors review the existing legal framework of UP and its relation to social accountability, examine how much of the social participation is spontaneous and how much is politically induced, question the success of the Citizen's Charter and Right to...

Over the past three decades, our conceptualizations of literacy and what it means to be literate have expanded to include recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through modalities such as the visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic and that different modes are combined in complex ways to make meaning. The field of multimodality is concerned with how human beings use different modes of communication to represent or make meaning in the world. Despite the rapi...