This book contains the full text of papers and posters presented at the International Conference on Education and New Developments (END 2024), organized by the World Institute for Advanced Research and Science (WIARS). Education, in our contemporary world, is a right since we are born. Every experience has a formative effect on the constitution of…

In spite of being relatively wealthy and resource-rich, a persistent narrative of the island state of Tasmania is the deficit framing of its regional and rural education where, under the placeless and mobile orientation of hypermodernity, the only serious option for success for its young is to leave their communities. This paper presents a…

Inertia created by the 15 years of teacher quality reform leading up to Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), coupled with a renewed focus on innovation and flexibility under ESSA, might provide a recipe for establishing new ways to recruit, develop, and retain teachers in rural schools. Many hope that the development of complex and tailored staffing…

In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase "the sociological imagination" to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the…

In this article, the author examines the growth of the current strain of fundamentalism that is influencing rural schools in the United States, and how it is, according to him, creating a self-sustaining pipeline of fundamentalists into positions of power. The author details the type of anti-public and anti-democratic education being expressed…

In this descriptive and comparative study, we present results highlighting the complexity and scope of the challenges facing rural districts as they navigate the changing demographics of the students and families they serve. Rapid increases in the number and concentration of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in rural areas…

This article describes a statewide online alternative teacher preparation program in early childhood special education. The history and evolution of the program is explained along with the programmatic changes that resulted from working with noncertified teachers with a wide variety of backgrounds in both rural and urban districts. Challenges and…

This study examines how rural school and community leaders in one of the most rural areas of the United States are able to collaboratively design a grassroots school reform initiative to address inequity issues related to childhood poverty and trauma. Through interviews conducted with advisory board members implementing the reform effort, as well…

This article explores how social movement co-governance of public education offers an alternative to neoliberal educational models. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest social movements in Latin America. We describe one of the many schools that the MST co-governs, the Itinerant School Paths of Knowledge (Caminhos do…

This article is about designing for educational possibilities--designs that in their inception, social organization, and implementation squarely address issues of cultural diversity, social inequality, and robust learning. I discuss an approach to design-based research, social design experiments, that privileges a social scientific inquiry…

In this commentary, we revisit "NCLB and the Demand for Highly Qualified Teachers: Challenges and Solutions for Rural Schools," an article we published in this journal in 2005. We consider the predictions we made then about the impact of the Highly Qualified Teacher mandate on special education teacher (SET) shortages in rural states and…

The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) supports close to 70 developing countries to ensure that every child receives a quality education. The featured stories in this report show the progress that developing country partners are making in getting more children, especially girls, in school and learning. The results are not only evidence of…

Public schools have, for generations, played a critical role in the lives of the vast majority of North Carolinians-they are ingrained into the fabric of identity as a state. Many of the issues in the Top Ten highlight where the erosion of the historic commitment to public schools for the public good is seen. The Public School Forum of North…

This case study of a Ghanaian rural school district uses a community-based participatory action research to engage with municipal officials, a rural community, and its local school participants to codesign culturally sustainable education strategies. The study triangulated community meeting discussion, interviews, field notes and document analysis…

Rural depopulation, decreasing numbers of children, and general centralization, combined with high expectations for education, are factors that challenge rural communities and school structures in both Latvia and Norway. The aim of this article is to compare the role of the municipality and other levels of governance in making decisions on school…