Today, the US public educational landscape features both well-funded and richly resourced segregated white schools and underfunded, poorly resourced majority black, Latino, Native American, and poor schools. Efforts to remedy these problems are ongoing and varied. Some parents and educators have turned away from traditional public schools and have…

The call for American students to meet world-class standards in the federal Goals 2000: Education America Act (1994) and No Child Left Behind legislation, as well as state standards and accountability legislation, has been explicitly inclusive: All students must be held to these high standards. Litigation offers the potential to leverage…

This article analyses the innovation agenda of the European Union (EU), places it in the context of globalisation and explores its foundation in the theoretical innovation systems perspective. It analyses a number of the central policy domains of this agenda: higher education, doctoral education, research and knowledge transfer. In the second part…

This article examines the access policies in Portuguese higher education, from the 1974 revolution to the present. Recently, under the simultaneous pressure of a declining birth rate and increasing financial stringency, higher education institutions, both public and private, have started to compete for students, while responding to increasing…

Demand for university education has increased due to the recent innovations of universal, free and compulsory education at the basic and senior secondary education level. Education has been expanding very rapidly at all levels in Nigeria. However, there are serious problems related to quality, equity, unavailable human and material resources and…

Standards are the results of concerted efforts to improve the quality of education found in distance education. Legal and ethical standards are needed to ensure a positive educational environment. Participants from different cultural, physical, economical, and intellectual backgrounds should have equal access to all the positive aspects of…

The purpose of this study is to expand the definition of adequacy by adding soft skills as a measure of school productivity. The singular focus on academic standards inherent in education policy has prevented scholars from seeing the concept of adequacy through myriad perspectives and has contributed to a resegregation of schools. Education policy…

May 17, 2004 marked the fifty years that have passed since the United States Supreme Court handed down one of its most famous, compelling and iconic decisions, "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas." Certainly the decision itself, labeling the practice of "separate but equal" as unconstitutional, deserves the fanfare…

The inclusion of students with disabilities at the university is a relatively new occurrence in the field of special education. Although legislation in the United States has supported the acceptance of students with disabilities at the post-secondary level, it has only provided minimal support with the emphasis on the learner rather than the…

Equity in education relies on equal access to learning experiences and fair play during those experiences. Too often policy makers, voters and even some educators define equity only in terms of equal access. Equity is less about the same treatment for all and more about holding everyone to the same high standards and high expectations. All…

This paper draws on a four-year longitudinal ESRC funded project examining learning experiences of disabled students in higher education in four universities. The focus here is on institutional responses to the demands of audit culture and legislation in relation to making reasonable adjustments for students with impairments. The data comes from…

Changes in affirmative action policies in some states create possibilities for "natural experiments" to observe the effect of public policy on racial and ethnic inequality in American society. This study measured the impact of Initiative 200, a ballot measure that eliminated affirmative action in Washington State, on the transition from…

It is now the responsibility of educators to provide for the education of severely handicapped students in what has been referred to as "the least restrictive educational environment." This paper discusses least restrictive educational environments in relation to segregation versus integration, interactions with nonhandicapped age peers,…

When Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, it included Section 504 which forbade discrimination against persons with disabilities by programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance, which included virtually every institution of higher education, except the U.S. military academies and a few small religious schools. This was…