America brims with education data and these days it seems everyone in education claims to be guided by data. In this book, leaders and scholars map the landscape of data providers and users and explores why what is supplied by the former but frequently fails to meet the needs of the latter. It documents the barriers to collecting good information,…

"Informal Adult Learning: Shaping the Way Ahead," the Government's consultation on the future of informal adult learning in England, was launched by Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, John Denham, on January 15, 2007. The consultation invites respondents to help shape "a new vision for informal adult…

Taking up a theme raised by Stuart Cunningham in a recent issue of the "AUR"--that the innovations of Australia's humanities, creative arts, and social sciences are not getting the recognition that they deserve from the nation's government--this paper, dealing only with the social sciences, offers a cautionary note. If the social…

Leo Strauss is commonly cited as a seminal influence for the neoconservatism that, in the minds of many commentators, dominates the administration of George W. Bush. What intersection, if any, exists between Strauss's views and neoconservatism? This paper investigates that question by studying Strauss's writings on liberal education and assessing…

This essay proposes a set of non-econometric tests using data on wage structure, school resource costs, public expenditures, taxes, and rates of return to explain anomalies in which richer political units deliver less education than poorer ones. Both the anomalies of education history, and its less surprising contrasts, fit broad patterns that can…

The essay investigates the place of religious and secular education in the lives of Chinese Muslim women. Education is treated as a site where state and society are reproduced and/or challenged, where tensions arise over control of minds and bodies, and over interpretations and uses of religion and culture. Specifically, the essay compares…

This review of literature on South Asian nomads is part of a series of monographs on educational access published by the Consortium for Research on Educational Access Transitions and Equity (CREATE). In the context of India, most recent work has focused on access to the education system for the poor. CREATE research in India has focused on …

"Between Public and Private" examines an innovative approach to school district management that has been adopted by a number of urban districts in recent years: a portfolio management model, in which "a central office oversees a portfolio of schools offering diverse organizational and curricular themes, including traditional public…

This article introduces the notion of the "educational franchise" of Australia's public universities established in the mid-nineteenth century. In his recently published study of the public university and social access in the United States, John Aubrey Douglass suggests that from the mid-nineteenth century a social contract was formed…

In this paper I conduct a historical analysis of the emergence of ALBA in Nicaragua prior to Daniel Ortega's return to the presidency and the country's official membership in the initiative from January 2007 on. I argue that ALBA is a rival structure that evolved from the contradictions inherent in hegemonic globalisation. Within the framework of…

In this essay, Benjamin Baez and Susan Talburt analyze the U.S. Department of Education's Helping Your Child Series to consider how the government of children, families, and schools reflects a concern with two seemingly unrelated political objectives of neoliberal projects: creating responsible, self-reliant citizens and making schools more…

In recent years the UK secondary educational landscape has witnessed significant change, with the introduction of an ever-extending spectrum of competing government initiatives and policies. This has resulted in the steady erosion of the traditionally recognized role of headteacher. This paper presents the results of a practitioner-based study…

By the time he left office, President Bush's faith-based initiative had become a kind of stand-in for his entire presidency. Whenever something went wrong on Bush's watch it was tarred as yet another "faith-based" policy. As the 2008 presidential election began to take shape, with the Democrats newly in charge of both the House and the Senate and…

The charter school landscape is dramatically different today compared to when the federal government first forayed into the field in 1994. That year it established the Charter School Program as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA. The Charter School Program, which is designed to support the startup of new public charter…

Higher education in the United States has received much scrutiny in the recent past from the federal and state governments, the press and the general public. In response to this scrutiny, a number of blue ribbon panels have been formed to examine how effectively higher education is serving American society. In this article, I analyse the…