For a great portion of the history of the American education system, multiage education was the norm in one-room schoolhouses throughout the nation. The current graded, curriculum-centered approach in the U.S. appeared during the mid-nineteenth century with the rapid economic development and massive immigration into the country. Concurrently, some…

The concept of City Academies owes much to the plan for a network of City Technology Colleges announced by Conservative Education Secretary Kenneth Baker in 1986. This article argues that all this can be viewed as part of the inroad of business into state education, with private sponsorship seen by government as the magical solution to the…

Critical Small Schools: Beyond Privatization in New York City Urban Educational Reform features the most current empirical research about the successes and challenges of the small schools movement and the implications of such for urban public educational policy. Situated in a climate of hierarchical reform, many of the principles of the original…

Community schools and other approaches to Alternative Primary Education or APE have increased access to primary education for underserved populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as a major goal of the Education for All (EFA) movement. In Zambia, a country where an estimated 20 percent of the basic education enrollment now attends community…

Since the days when the country was dotted with one-room schoolhouses, many changes have taken place in school governance and management. In 1940, there were over 117,000 public school districts in the United States. In 2000, there were fewer than 15,000, even though the student population of the country had doubled in that time. While school…

Both in the United States and the United Kingdom there has been a recent resurgence of interest and support for "new localism" in response to the need to provide local solutions to national complex problems. In this paper, the authors begin by exploring the contextual framework in the U.S. and the UK, explaining recent policy reform and…

The National Study of CMO (charter management organizations) Effectiveness is a national, longitudinal research effort designed to measure how nonprofit charter school management organizations (CMOs) affect student achievement, and to examine the internal structures, practices, and policy contexts that may influence these outcomes. The study began…

The latest installment of the Fordham Institute's "Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning" series investigates one of the more controversial aspects of digital learning: How much does it cost? In this paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and online-schooling experts to estimate today's average…

Fifteen years ago further education (FE) colleges in England were removed from local education authority (LEA) control and re-formed as "FE corporations". Now, it is proposed that, from 2010, local authorities will become re-involved in the running of FE. Given such a prospect, this article takes the opportunity to look back at colleges…

Sweden has undertaken major national reforms of its school sector, which, consequently, has been classified as one of the most decentralized ones in the OECD. This paper investigates whether local tax base, grants, and preferences affected local school resources differently as decentralization took place. We find that municipal tax base affects…

How do a school and a community interact? This question guided this dissertation examining one rural school and community. The purpose of this case study was to investigate the relationship between the rural Marceline R-V School District (a K-12 school system) and its community, Marceline, Missouri. The framework for this study included the…

Education finance has emerged as one of the most pressing public policy issues of the new century. Americans spend more than $500 billion a year on elementary and secondary education, yet neither policy-makers nor practitioners seems to know how to align these resources with student learning goals. In fact, spending increases have outstripped…

Educational inequalities are evident even before children start school. Some educational achievement gaps widen out as individuals progress further through the education sequence and into the labour market, especially those connected to disadvantaged students. Thus, there is a significant need for careful evaluation of educational policies that…

This phenomenological study of school consolidation is an investigation of how education policy that dictates the reorganization of schools and districts impacts educational choices, learning environments, and school culture. Although quality studies of optimal school size for promoting student achievement and cutting costs have emerged in the…

Danish upper-secondary school is currently undergoing remarkable changes. Comprehensive reforms and restructuring have transformed teacher roles and school organization. However, not all upper-secondary teachers welcome reform: on the one hand, they have to adopt norms, standards and values determined by colleagues, if they want to "fit…