This paper reports on the "Fair Go Project", research into student engagement among primary school students living in poor communities in South-Western Sydney, Australia. Taking as a starting point recent work into classroom pedagogies ("Productive Pedagogies") and drawing on Bernstein's concept of classrooms as message…

Development literature suggests that private schools serving the poor are not part of the solution to meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education. The study conducted a census and survey of schools in notified slums of Hyderabad, India, to contribute to the sparse literature on the nature and extent of private…

This article examines the controversy that continues to surround the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Since its passage, NCLB has been criticized for a number of reasons. One of the criticisms is that it is unfair to include special education students and students with limited English proficiency in the accountability system and judge them by the…

Though, in theory, black students may have access to equal educational opportunity by occupying the same classroom space as their peers, they do not necessarily enjoy the same quality of experience. This inequality results from the race-related beliefs and norms and white privilege embedded in United States society. This study deconstructed one…

Hoping to achieve the current Japanese administration's goals of decentralisation and privatisation, the Japanese government has granted substantial latitude to local governments and individual schools as part of its recent reform of foreign language education. In introducing English at elementary schools (EES), micro-language policies have been…

This report describes one preservice teacher's development of mathematics instruction during her student-teaching internship in a kindergarten classroom at a low-performing, urban elementary school. A framework of social strategies was used to describe the student teacher's use of strategic compromise as a way to deal with competing pressures and…

Over the past several decades, researchers, politicians, and corporate leaders have focused reform efforts on the size of educational contexts. Hundreds of billions of public and private dollars have been invested to reduce the size and scope of both classrooms and schools (Lee & Ready, 2007). Unlike many education reforms, these downsizing…

This paper is part of a study that assessed the level of commitment of primary schools of remote area dwellers (RADs) to basic education between October 2004 and April 2005. The research question focused on the level of commitment of schools to universal basic education, school-community partnership in school governance and parental involvement in…

There have been increasing expectations that all primary school students and teachers actively use information and communications technologies (ICT) in their learning. In order to achieve this it is important that appropriate environments are set up to support the varying needs and potential of the different groups within the school context.…

This Policy Brief describes and explains patterns of access to schooling in Bangladesh. It outlines types of educational provision and provides some basic statistics on access, vulnerability and exclusion, as well as insights into the characteristics of those denied access. It is based on findings from the "Country Analytic Review on Access…

Improving education outcomes is important for Germany's long-term economic performance and social cohesion. While student achievement is above the OECD average in science and at the OECD average in reading and mathematics according to the 2006 OECD PISA study, weaker students tend to do badly by international comparison and socio-economic and/or…

California policymakers have pursued various strategies for raising student achievement over the past half-century. The state's schools now advance demanding curricular standards which are among the most rigorous in the nation. These are in the form of "content" and "performance" standards. This paper, stemming from a Policy…

Using school-level descriptive data, this study examined the distribution of teachers in the Commonwealth of Kentucky in an attempt to build on previous research concerning the equity of the finance system in the state. Rather than focusing on revenue from the perspective of horizontal equity, this study used human resource data to examine the…

In this paper, we use a unique data set that includes a panel of all teachers in North Carolina over a 4-year period (1996-1997 through 1999-2000) to describe the distribution of teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) across classrooms, schools, and districts. The sorting of National Board Certified…

The six EFA goals help to shape policies and priorities especially in developing countries; they can be seen as discrete targets or as a cohesive collection of complimentary developmental areas to improve learning for people of all ages and stages. The paper argues that the cohesion, success and impact of the EFA would be improved enormously if…