The Tunisian education system, like that of many other Southern nations of intermediate wealth, finds itself pulled in opposing directions. While quantitative advances at different levels of instruction have been easily achieved, a reorientation towards qualitative matters is nowadays more than ever necessary. This article analyses developments…

Governors and state and local education officials assumed that raising student achievement in the elementary and middle grades would solve the problems with high schools--but it hasn't. Why? Good information is the basis for successful improvement, and high school reform lacks accurate information about what students are to learn and about how…

One of the most important technical institutions of higher learning in Russia is the Urals State Technical University (USTU). In the years that it has been in operation, Urals State Technical University-Urals Polytechnical Institute (USTU-UPI) has trained more than 185,000 specialists of high qualifications, people who have gone on to work in…

Public-sector higher education plays a critical role within the larger environment of higher education opportunity. Public universities are not the sole players in meeting necessary state outcomes, but they are by far the largest producers of higher education outcomes in South Dakota. This Fact Book, for Fiscal Year 2007, is the single best source…

What if every high school across the country were mandated to provide all students with four years of math, four years of English, three years of science and three years of social studies? What if all schools were required to participate in the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress? The federal government wants to play a big part…

The purpose of this article is to outline a framework that can be used to examine issues of equity and mathematics reform. Adapted from an opportunity-to-learn framework proposed by Tate (2004), this model includes factors related to time, quality, and design. This framework is applied to the cases of two secondary mathematics teachers to…

In the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2000 study, Finnish students showed significantly higher reading achievement than students of any other country/region. Finland also ranked among the best five countries in mathematical and scientific literacy. In Finland, the gap between high and low performers was relatively narrow,…

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) works with school and district leaders to help them more strategically use resources--people, time, and money--to improve student performance. They have found that many school districts begin creating small high schools without a clear sense of how much they will spend or how to ensure that small schools…

The importance of state academic standards soared in January 2002 with passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Not only does that milestone law require all states to have demanding academic standards in place and to demonstrate steady student progress toward academic proficiency as set forth in those standards, it also links states'…

The failure to ensure that the nation's classrooms are all staffed with qualified teachers is one of the most important problems in contemporary American education. Over the past decade, many panels, commissions, and studies have focused attention on this problem and, in turn, numerous reforms have been initiated to upgrade the quality and…

The strategy of development in rural areas of Croatia includes several factors. Among them is education. The education system in Croatia has a number of institutional, infrastructural and regional characteristics that are a frame of research for this article. Rural areas confront additional factors such as population migrations, poor…

During the last quarter of the century several universities including those in Michigan, Illinois, and Texas launched initiatives to ensure that high schools' academic standards prepared students for admission to the state university. This paper illuminates affiliation programs that foreshadowed the accreditation movement. Not only did affiliation…

This study conducted in four secondary schools across three years, provides an example of how stakeholder perceptions about school quality might be obtained and analyzed to aid in setting administrative objectives. The participating schools served predominantly Caucasian students in suburban and rural areas. Approximately 30% of students at these…

The Education Working Paper Series is produced by the Education Unit at the World Bank (HDNED). It provides an avenue for World Bank staff to publish and disseminate preliminary education findings to encourage discussion and exchange ideas within the World Bank and among the broader development community. Throughout the 1990s and into the…

The paper provides a comprehensive review of the major obstacles that hinder the participation of girls and women in higher education in Kenya. This is on the basis that their low participation in this level of education is a key constraint to the development of the country. While it is reckoned that girls' and women's education is inextricably…