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Ambitious programs of education reform have been introduced by many governments around the world. Reforming Education is an important study of large-scale education reform in five different settings: England, New Zealand, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Manitoba and the US state of Minnesota. The book looks at a variety of reforms covering: school choice; charter schools; increased testing of students; stricter curriculum guidelines; and local school management. Drawing from theoretical and empirical work in education, political theory, organizational theory and public administration, Reforming Education provides a clearly developed conceptual framework of analyzing reform programs. The author reviews the political origins of the reforms, the process of adoption into law, the implementation processes used to support the reforms and the results of the reforms for students, schools and communities.
The editors have compiled this critical and comparative study of changes which took place in the New Zealand education system in the second half of the twentieth century. For other Western societies who have felt the impact of New Right policies the New Zealand case is interesting because it provides some indication of how policies of decentralization in education might be used to develop egalitarian and democratic educational policies. In recent years there have been major changes to educational systems in the Western world. Often these changes have been justified by reference to successful educational practices in other countries. However, it is not always possible simply to abstract educational practices from one context and apply them in another successfully. Moreover claims that policies in one country are more successful than those in another have to be treated cautiously: there are always problems in making valid comparisons between the educational performances of different countries. It is important, therefore, that critical and comparative studies are made of educational systems which take full account of the contexts in which they are embedded.
This is a book about the struggle of many New Zealand families to have their children with learning disabilities included in local community schools. It reviews the influences in the post war period that shaped the state response to the right of all children to attend school. Reflections from both education policy makers and parents of that time are included. The book also examines the more recent impact of neoliberal politics on education policy and the consequences experienced by families with school-aged children with disabilities who may well become ‘collateral damage in the enterprise of improving schools.’ After examining the families’ experience the book asks how inclusion can be fostered in schools and classrooms? Practitioners and academics present research findings that indicate alternative ways of thinking and acting that attest to more ethical and humane responses to human difference. Citizens, school personnel, politicians and policy makers should be challenged by the tales from school arising from attempts to achieve a ‘world class, inclusive education system.’ Cover photograph by Rod Wills, “Oratia District School”
The restructuring of schools systems across the world has been controversial. Have reforms been driven by a desire to cut educational budgets or the need to improve the quality of educational provision? This book explores the restructuring movement, with a particular emphasis on how decentralisation of power has affected the quality of education. It provides a broad and international picture of educational reform.
This book focuses on important theoretical and policy debates on educational reform, with detailed analyses of reforms in 11 countries. It also explores the effects of geographical location, political ideology, and economic structure on shaping educational reform. Individual case studies are included on Australia, Cote d'Ivoire, England, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Spain, Tanzania, and the United States. The book covers the role of reform in changing education and addressing problems in the educational system, as well as its wider role in deflecting crises in the political and economic system, plus the effect of reform on educators, and educators upon reform. Extensive bibliography and reference lists accompany each chapter, including the introduction and conclusion. Contributors include: N'Dri Thérese Assié-Lumumba, John M. Barrington, Susan F. Cooper, Peter Darvas, Sara Morgenstern de Finkel, Esther E. Gottlieb, Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo, Don Martin, Henry D. R. Miller, Rolland Paulston, Rajeshwari Raghu, Susan Rippberger, Susan L. Robertson, Carlos Alberto Torres, George E. Urch, Roger R. Woock, and Hugo Zegarra.
New Zealand has been a veritable “laboratory” for a range of social experiments in the last twenty years, including an arranged marriage with neo-liberal economic policies during the late 80s and 90s. These experiments extended to education, where students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers have experienced wide-ranging “reforms” in administration, curriculum and qualifications. The most contentious of these have been a series of untrialled and radical qualifications reforms. This book offers a critical examination of these reforms from the perspective of a group of educators who resisted them by doing the unthinkable: devising their own national qualification and making it work.
This book shows that the faith in educational markets is misplaced. Throughout the English speaking world and now Western Europe and parts of East Asia parental choice and educational markets are being seen by politicians and policy advisors as the panacea to problems of low educational standards and social exclusion. This book is the first to systematically test the key assumptions underlying the faith in markets by linking an analysis of parental choice to flows of students between schools and their impact on school effectiveness. The results of this study suggest that the ability to realize choices is dependent on social class, gender and ethnicity and that this can have a negative impact on some schools' performance. Rather than raising standards the impact of markets is to polarise them, leading to an impoverished education for many students. This important book will be vital reading for students of educational policy, sociology of education and school effectiveness and improvement, educational researchers, academics and policymakers.
Twenty-five years ago the Māori Language Act was passed, but research still finds that the Māori language is dying. This collection looks at the state of the language since the Act, how the language is faring in education, media, texts and communities and what the future aspirations for the language are.
‘Your words of “discomfort, loss, and disconnection” don’t resonate with me at all.’ Ruth Richardson to Andrew Dean, 16 December 2014. A time of major upheaval now stands between young and old in New Zealand. In Ruth, Roger and Me, Andrew Dean explores the lives of the generation of young people brought up in the shadow of the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, those whom he calls ‘the children of the Mother of All Budgets’. Drawing together memoir, history and interviews, he explores the experiences of ‘discomfort’ and ‘disconnection’ in modern Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys is the outcome of the Cambridge Primary Review – England’s biggest enquiry into primary education for over forty years. Fully independent of government, it was launched in 2006 to investigate the condition and future of primary education at a time of change and uncertainty and after two decades of almost uninterrupted reform. Ranging over ten broad themes and drawing on a vast array of evidence, the Review published thiry-one interim reports, including twenty-eight surveys of published research, provoking media headlines and public debate, before presenting its final report and recommendations. This book brings together the twenty-eight resea...