Universities, and business schools specifically, are experiencing a transformation of their societal mission. Similar to the STEM fields, business schools are nested in global competitive environments facing multiple competing pressures, one being the need to demonstrate their social impact (SI). While business schools signal their commitment to…

This article aims to show the value of the concept of policy trajectory to compare, from a long-term perspective, the transformations of education policies in the context of globalisation. After discussing the scope and limitations of the analyses of the concept in the literature -- descriptive, sequential, metaphorical and building on the works…

In this paper, we analyse the trajectory of the French testing policy in education since 1973. Regarding its statistical tradition and its ability to produce its own evaluation tool, France may be regarded as an interesting case to interrogate the capacity of national educational systems to meet international standards of testing. Anchored in a…

This book identifies the cultural and moral foundations of country-specific educational governance and school leadership and presents the principles of justice and the diversity of common goods that guide leadership practices in schools. It contributes to an existing research field that studies diversity and ethical leadership in schools. The…

The last two decades have seen fast-moving and wholescale changes in the ways that education is now provided in French schools, in the nature of learner assessment, and in the form and scale of system evaluation. Innovation and reform have in part followed international trends, themselves triggered by the global impact of the international…

This article concentrates on the policy reforms of schools in England, Germany, France and Italy, from 1988 to 2009, with a focus on the introduction of market accountability. Pressing demands for organisational change in schools, shaped by the objectives of "efficiency" and competition, which were introduced in England in the 1980s,…

Over the past year, the nation's governors and state school chiefs have achieved laudable consensus around a set of math and English standards, developed voluntarily and without federal involvement through the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). Most states have signed on to them. More recently, the states have again teamed up--this…

The annual meeting of the ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) IQA (internal quality assurance) Group gathered some 60 participants in the premises of the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) in The Hague in June 2009. This seminar was a successful follow-up to the first ENQA IQA…

Smooth early childhood transitions are key to ensuring positive outcomes for young children the world over--but in today's fragmented early education systems, it's difficult to ensure continuity among programs and services. Early childhood professionals will help change that with this book, the first to propose a comprehensive, practical framework…

The title of this document is a deliberate play on the title of the biennial reports on the progress of Bologna produced by the European Students' Union, "Bologna With Student Eyes." It is a way of paying tribute to student involvement in the Bologna reforms, and marking a parallel student working participation in the state system…

Whether to adopt national standards and tests has long been a subject of lively debate in the United States. With 47 states now participating in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, and a commitment from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to allocate hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to the development of common tests, the country is…

Describes the increasing openness of French higher education and the move toward increasing autonomy at French institutions of higher education. Describes the incentive mechanisms of the French system and the need for an even greater degree of autonomy. (SLD)

Recent changes in the regulation of education systems in Europe and beyond have led to greater control over the work of teachers and the performance of schools. The paper draws upon the findings of a programme of funded comparative research, which has examined the impact of national education policy and policy change on teachers' work and…

The editorial, "Some Aspects of the Educational Change Dynamic: Setting School Autonomy and Evaluation in Context" (Cecilia Braslavsky), explains the focus of this issue. This "Open File: School Autonomy and Evaluation" section contains: "Introduction to the Open File" (Norberto Bottani; Bernard Favre); "IPES The…

Argues that Americans can learn from the wide variety of types of assessment included in French national evaluations, from the way these exams are used formatively on a large scale to plan instruction and professional development (rather than to pass or fail children or to reward or punish teachers), and from the hazards of a single high stakes…