This article examines cross-country variations in adult skills inequality and asks why skills in Anglophone countries are so unequal. Drawing on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's recent Survey of Adult Skills and other surveys, it investigates the differences across countries and country groups in inequality in both…

Comparative education is singularly ill-equiped to examine interactions in a situation of conflict and domination between rival cultures, educational systems, or related positions of economic and political power within dominated and colonized societies. Comparative education may still be possible if a more inclusive and comprehensive framework of…

A former member of the IEA's global "invisible college" reflects on some aspects of the organization's work and findings, pointing out that international differences in achievement are generally smaller than within-nation differences and that national differences in context and input are associated with broadly similar outcomes. Also…

Reviews comparative studies of values education in industrialized nations, focusing on the absence of value-neutrality among institutions and teachers; national differences in educational goals and contradictions among various goals; influence of nonschool factors; efficacy of educational policy about values; emphasis on common core values; and…

The author examines national differences in scholastic performance, as indicated by IEA Study test scores, between the developed and less-developed nations, and outlines hypotheses for the poorer performance of the less-developed nations. This article is the second of three in a symposium on the IEA Studies. (SJL)