There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century social sciences to change urban conditions and populations, and appears today in international school assessments and professional education.…

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's (SHEEO) "Communities of Practice" project builds upon SHEEO's ongoing efforts to measure the capacity and effective use of state postsecondary data systems and provides states with opportunities to develop solutions to common issues with those systems. The sixth Community of…

Access to quality education for all children is a common mantra for countless national and world organizations, such as the UN and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper examines the struggle within two nations who continue to move beyond the impact of racial segregation in the United States (US) and "apartheid" in South…

This article is a version of a lecture given by the author at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. He reviews his book, "Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture." He examines the issues within the school reform movement in American public education--focusing on what he calls the "bifurcation of…

What do citizens of the United States and Germany think about their schools and school policies? This paper offers the first broad comparison of public thinking on education in the two countries. We carried out opinion surveys of representative samples of the German and American adult populations in 2014 that included experiments in which we…

During a 3-week seminar in July 1973 at Aspen, Colorado designed to discuss the erosion of public support for higher education, presentations fell into the following categories: historical perspectives; access, higher education and employment; autonomy and systems; the professoriate; and research on higher education. Presentations included in this…

In 1989, New Zealand implemented a decentralized education system centered on school-based management. Outcomes of decentralization include higher workloads at the school level, more structural opportunities for parental voice, and resource discrepancies between schools in low- and high-income areas. This paper describes and analyzes the changes…

Topics discussed are: (1) student aid and access to postsecondary education (Jack L. Woodward); (2) values in athletics (Grant Dungee); (3) some considerations in planning for postsecondary education (Paul G. Orr); (4) the open university as a challenge for postsecondary education in Mississippi (Cleopatra D. Thompson); and (5) comprehensive…

The Chicago Public Schools have recently been restructured by the Illinois General Assembly, radically altering patterns of governance (voice) and patterns of choice in Chicago. This paper analyzes the history of the Chicago restructuring campaign and the specific conception of school-based governance enacted into law. The paper also analyzes the…

The study reported in this paper looked at the manner in which education in Canada is being financially supported and the potential consequences this support will have for the future. For the most part, Canadian provinces have in-place funding mechanisms that put them in sole control of finances; local fiscal autonomy has all but disappeared.…

The attempt to give the third and fourth years of university study in France more vocational relevance (the second cycle reform of 1976) is analyzed in relation to the fundamental transformations taking place in French higher education in the areas of access to higher education, institutional diversification, and university governance. Although…

Though community colleges have long been committed to providing equal access and equal opportunity to all persons in their service districts, the need to meet the education and training needs of underserved racial and ethnic minorities in urban communities remains a significant challenge to educational leaders. Several books and reports issued…

Although charter schools are rapidly becoming an integral part of the public-school landscape, much remains unknown about them. This paper reports on the findings of a descriptive-research study that comprised an analysis of U.S. charter-school statutes. The focus of the investigation was on equity in the areas of student recruitment, admission…

One of the outgrowths of the student counterculture of the late 1960's and 1970's was the emergence of a specifically educational counterculture that found a following among members of college and university faculties. As war and militarism declined as dominant issues provoking campus unrest, assaults on the structure of higher education…