This article demonstrates, through Michael Gascoigne's "Tunzi the Faithful Shadow" (1988), that literature for children is sometimes employed by the government into the service of propagating dominant state ideologies in Zimbabwean schools. Such texts disseminate issues of inclusion and exclusion that characterise all nation building…

This review of Mexico's Better Schools Programme was conducted in 2012 by the OECD Centre for Effective Learning Environments (CELE). In 2008, the federal government created the Programme to repair and improve the physical infrastructure of schools for basic education throughout Mexico. A key characteristic of the programme is social participation…

Moldova's public expenditures on education as a share of GDP and total public sector spending are higher than in most countries in the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Moldova's challenges to improve the quality and efficiency of education provision need to be addressed in a context of…

This study seeks to address the ways in which the federal government has influenced elementary and secondary education throughout Canada. By producing teaching and learning material that is neither provincially sanctioned nor provincially focused, are federal agencies crossing constitutional jurisdictions in ways that compete with provincially…

In Russia, it has been claimed that there is a problem with the number of graduates who do not have a career in the subjects in which they majored. Research shows that those whose education was supported by government grants were not, as a consequence, less committed to a career in their specialties.

The author of this article expands the background theory of voting to incorporate the undergraduate majors of members of Congress. Examining nine votes on trade across the 109th and 110th Congresses reveals that economics majors are the only category of college major to vote in favor of free trade in a predictable way. Controls for a variety of…

Following the end of the 1956 Revolution, a significant number of university students fled Hungary and the human capital flooding into Austria drew the attention of universities worldwide. The cold war and its influence on international student organisations and on the domestic conceptualisation of refugees in the USA contextualise this case study…

At the turn of the century, the United States was trying to come to grips with a serious education crisis. The country was lagging behind its international peers, and a half-century effort to erode racial disparities in school achievement had made little headway. Many people expected action from the federal government. George W. Bush and Barack…

University education remains a major player in the socio-economic revamping of Africa even though most African national governments have not leveraged the high output of the private sector for educational development. For the most part to date, private universities are running as parallels to their public counterparts. With fewer infrastructures,…

This article analyses the "soft power" that the Federal Government of Brazil has gained by designing and implementing a very ambitious Plan for the Development of Education. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the country in 2009 and 2010 in order to conduct a discourse analysis of the strategy deployed by the key political agents. The…

The Federal Government in Australia has recently established Centres for Excellence in Teacher Education. These Centres represent a power shift towards schools in teacher education and away from centralised bureaucracies and university faculties of education. Given this shift, it is interesting to examine other historical and current school-based…

Organizational evaluation capacity building has been a topic of increasing interest in recent years. However, the actual dimensions of evaluation capacity have not been clearly articulated through empirical research. This study sought to address this gap by identifying the key dimensions of evaluation capacity in Canadian federal government…

Recent changes in education and training policy in England continue to focus on creating a 'demand-led' system in an environment where public funds are dwindling and where more responsibility is being devolved away from central government. This raises questions about governance of the system, among others, and the roles that key system actors are…

This paper draws upon and critiques the Australian federal government's website "My School" as an archetypal example of the current tendency to abstract and quantify educational practice. Arguing in favour of a moral philosophical account of educational practice, the paper reveals how the "My School" website reduces complex…

When the author first heard that the earthquake that hit Haiti destroyed entire Haitian cities and killed more than a quarter million people, he was shocked. For him, it was apparent that this was more than a natural disaster. As he learned about the role the U.S. government had played in Haitian affairs--the multiple occupations, the support for…