This paper analyses the origin, development and fall of the 'school voucher' system in Spain. It was called the Ley de Financiación de la Enseñanza Obligatoria (Compulsory Education Financing Law) (LFEO), and this reform represented the first attempt at an international level to establish a school voucher model for a whole country. This article…

This paper addresses aspects of alternative proposals taking place in the public education system, based on an anthropological, ethnographic, comparative study of alternative schools and educational projects in Catalonia. More specifically, it first explores educational change in Catalonia through time and on the present, with a special focus on…

This paper offers a review of history of education statistics in Spain, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, describing their traditional means of operation based on censuses, flat tables, and macro-statistical data, which usually display a purely quantitative analysis. Only in recent decades have statistical analyses appeared, supported by…

This article aims to question the widely accepted idea that female university students in Spain have, in the past, tended to opt for degrees in the field of humanities. Based on an analysis of the official statistics that are currently available, the paper demonstrates that Spanish female university students showed a clear preference for…

School failure is substantive in Spain. The percentage of students that do not achieve the compulsory education diploma is around 20%. School failure is higher for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Students who "fail" cannot continue to post-compulsory education and, sooner or later, they have to leave formal education. The…

Background/Context: Throughout history, a country's economic and military strength has influenced its times of cultural splendor and the rise of famous intellectuals and artists. Spain has been an exception to this. At the turn of the 20th century, a surprising series of events that no one could have predicted occurred. At the time, Spain had…

This article analyses the educational inclusion of students with severe and permanent disabilities in the different autonomous communities of the Spanish State. After describing the Spanish socio-economic context, a comparative analysis is carried out based on the following indicators: the conception of severe, permanent disabilities; the…

The research presented in this article concerns la Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional (Spanish Agency for International Cooperation--AECI) and its growing presence in Latin America since the late 1990s. The aim is to evaluate the transformative potential that bilateral funding can have on educational reform in the region. The article…

Describes Aracena (Spain) and its educational history. Compares the experience of schooling and community from the perspectives of middle-class and working-class students. Explores social and cultural factors that may explain why middle-class students are more likely than working-class students to continue their education despite similar…

This volume contains papers submitted to the 11th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 14-17 May 2013, and papers submitted to the 1st International Distance Partner Conference, organized by the International Research Centre "Scientific Cooperation,"…