Exploring the School Choice Universe: Evidence and Recommendations gives readers a comprehensive, complete picture of choice policies and issues. In doing so, it offers cross-cutting insights that are obscured when one looks only at single issue or a single approach to choice. The book examines choice in its various forms: charter schools, home schooling, online schooling, voucher plans that allow students to use taxpayer funds to attend private schools, tuition tax credit plans that provi...

Over the past twenty years, educational policy has been characterized by top-down, market-focused policies combined with a push toward privatization and school choice. The new Every Student Succeeds Act continues along this path, though with decision-making authority now shifted toward the states. These market-based reforms have often been touted as the most promising response to the challenges of poverty and educational disenfranchisement. But has this approach been successful? Has learni...

In March 2010, the Obama administration released A Blueprint for Reform, setting forth its proposed revisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. If enacted, the Blueprint will shape the curriculum, standards, assessments, and accountability systems of schools throughout the nation. It will also determine how and where federal education funds will be targeted, further increase federal control over K-12 education, and increase the private-sector role in the operation of public sc...

In a recent international comparative study, the United States public schools did not fare well with the rest of the world. To the disappointment of many, the No Child Left Behind law did little to improve student achievement. Nevertheless, a small pocket of poverty schools worked against the odds of limited resources and performed to new heights of academic excellence. These high-poverty, high-performing schools were studied to identify the common trends and to reveal their secrets of suc...

Curriculum and Imagination describes an alternative ‘process’ model for designing developing, implementing and evaluating curriculum, suggesting that curriculum may be designed by specifying an educational process which contains key principles of procedure.This comprehensive and authoritative book:offers a practical and theoretical plan for curriculum-making without objectivesshows that a curriculum can be best planned and developed at school level ...

The post-Mao period has witnessed rapid social and economic transformation in all walks of Chinese life – much of it fuelled by, or reflected in, changes to the country’s education system. This book analyses the development of that system since the abandonment of radical Maoism and the inauguration of ‘Reform and Opening’ in the late 1970s.The principal focus is on formal education in schools and conventional institutions of tertiary education, but there is also some discussion of ...

Finnish education has been a focus of global interest since its first PISA success in 2001. After years of superficial celebration, astonishment and educational tourism, the focus has recently shifted to what is possibly the most interesting element of this Finnish success story: that Finnish schools have been effectively applying methods that go against the flow of global education policy with no testing, no inspection, no hard evaluation, no detailed national curriculum, no accountabilit...

There are separate set of numerals in different languages to represent numerals from 1 to 9. 'The Genetic Code of All Languages,' works on explaining the reason behind choosing a particular name and symbol for each of them.

Action research continues to see a growth in interest both internationally and across disciplines. This book demonstrates the diversity in settings and focus for action research and provides a guide to its core aspiration: to achieve principled change. Written by authors from a range of countries and range of disciplines (including education, health care, palliative care, social work and community development), this book answers these key questions:How can action re...

This book reflects on the contemporary use of ethnography across both social and natural sciences, focusing in particular on organizational ethnography, autoethnography, and the role of storytelling. The chapters interrogate and reframe longstanding ethnographic discussions, including those concerning reflexivity and positionality, while exploring evolving themes such as the experiential use of technologies. The open and honest accounts presented in the volume explore the perennial anxieti...

Schools That Succeed, Students Who Achieve compares the academic achievements of students in the United States to those of students in other countries. Examining fundamental questions and educational issues, James Deneen identifies what all students should learn and discusses what American students currently learn.Deneen argues that failing schools can become successful by studying examples of successful schools with similar demographic features. To that end, he presents pr...

Over the past few decades universities have opened their doors to students whose parents and grandparents were historically excluded from societal participation and higher education for reasons associated with racial, ethnic, socio-economic and/or linguistic diversity. Many of these students are first generation - or first in their family to attend university. While some progress has been made in responding to the needs of these internationally underserved learners, many challenges remain....