Interest in school choice has reached an unprecedented level in the United States. This paper discusses the origins, political context, and controversy surrounding the 1985 Minnesota Postsecondary Enrollment Options Act (PEO), the first state-level school choice initiative and a major catalyst for other states and districts. The first section…

The weakness of English and other language instruction in Poland is due largely to the political system after World War II. Political and economic change and gradual recognition of the importance of English have recently increased rapidly. Expanded contact with the West calls for immediate qualitative and quantitative changes in English language…

Educational reform movements aimed at providing equal opportunities for minority children have ignored the basic social, political, and economic context in which schooling takes place. Although equal educational opportunity has emerged as the central ideology of American schooling, underlying characteristics of American society prevent these…

The reciprocal relationship of college founding and social factors in the external environment was studied in connection with the first public junior college in three states. The three cases were: Saginaw Junior College (reportedly established in 1895 in Michigan); McCook Junior College (1926, Nebraska); and Springfield Junior College (1917,…

A variety of hypotheses dealing with the participation in decision-making of members at different levels of rural schools and the degree of implementation in these schools of planned organizational changes are explored. Participation is examined in two spheres: decisions relating to the operations of the school district in general, and planning of…

The conference papers in this publication focus on the interrelationship between change in the education sector and change in the wider society. The papers were generated by an invitational conference held in 1980 to mark the golden jubilee year of the Australian Council for Educational Research. While many of the papers have an Australian…

Exploratory case study research, conducted in selected Individually Guided Instruction (IGE) elementary home-school environments, focused on four objectives: describe IGE implementation and home-school-community relations, explain objective one in political terms, generate hypotheses, and make recommendations. Approximately 50 interviews were…

The early seventies were strikingly similar in some ways to the early forties. In both periods strong forces operated to reform education. These pressures arose in the main from a pervasive sense of crisis and threat to the culture. A major purpose of this study is to shed some light on the nature and impact of the forces of change that affect…

This book focuses on the question of how citizen participation affects the making of the school budget, the crucial controlling instrument of modern bureaucratic organizations. The four communities studied differed in size, social and economic characteristics, and form of government. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and begins the discussion of the…

This paper focuses on four participants in the public schools: parents, students, teachers, and administrators. These parties make up the key school community. This discussion highlights the rights and responsibilities of each of these major groups, especially in the curriculum, budget, and personnel areas of educational organization. In order to…

This report outlines the background of educational policy and objectives before and after the Cultural Revolution in China. The basis of Chinese educational philosophy is Marxism-Leninism; the ideal society is that of the Marxian utopia of a classless society. The role of education is service to the state, not the individual. Educational policy is…

Institutions of higher learning in the United States have hastened to create ethnic studies programs, perhaps as a sort of "fire insurance" against student activism and protests. Certainly the move toward ethnic studies has roots in the student activism of the 1960s. Such studies are particularly prominent in large public institutions,…

This paper asserts that initiatives to promote community colleges in Latin America should be linked with assessments of Latin American higher education overall. What are the higher education norms and practices that have largely excluded such colleges? And what changing reality opens doors for them? This paper highlights the concept of…

Depicts the problems encountered by a Soviet history teacher whose textbooks and materials have not kept pace with the policy of Glasnost and student attitudes. Suggests that textbooks be replaced with original documents, scholarly articles, and memoirs. (SLM)

Brings together critical theory and sociohistorical and sociocultural theories to explore why current reform efforts have not significantly changed the nature of teaching and learning contexts, teacher-student relationships, and the knowledge forms and uses constructed in school settings. Current contexts of school learning restrict access to…