In "Challenging the One Best System," a team of leading education scholars offers a rich comparative analysis of the set of urban education governance reforms collectively known as the "portfolio management model." They investigate the degree to which this model--a system of schools operating under different types of governance…

Education, which has been at the heart of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's history and civilizations for centuries, has a large untapped potential to contribute to human capital, well-being, and wealth. The region has invested heavily in education for decades, but it has not been able to reap the benefits of its investments.…

Educational policy continues to be of major concern. Policy debates about economic growth and national competitiveness, for example, commonly focus on the importance of human capital and a highly educated workforce. Defining the theoretical boundaries and methodological approaches of education policy research are the two primary themes of this…

"Managing School Districts for High Performance" brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human…

In this book, several Hoover Institution scholars search for the answers to failures in U.S. schools and examine the debate over what works and what does not work. Such widely debated topics as national examinations, accountability, performance, and school funding are discussed. The importance of education to both the individual and society as a…

This book speaks to three challenges that face higher education in its quest to redefine the academic community: (1) beliefs about ourselves, our circumstances, our relationships, and our problems; (2) beliefs about personal and organizational change; and (3) beliefs about academic life, about reform and revolution, competition and cooperation,…

Fiscal inefficiency in education is addressed in this book and ideas for achieving increased efficiency while more effectively using resources to maintain reasonable equality of opportunity in higher education are examined. Fourteen articles and authors that consider social efficiency, equity, and policy implications are as follows: "Efficiency…

This book on the economics of education is concerned primarily with how and why the student goes about acquiring whatever human capital he or she wishes and how the institutional setting of the university influences the amount of human capital that the student acquires. The learning process is dealt with, and an economic theory of learning, which…