This volume of International Perspectives on Education and Society highlights the valuable role that educational policy plays in the development of education and society around the world.

The role of policy in the development of education is crucial. Much rests on the decisions, support, and most of all resources that policymakers can either give or withhold in any given situation. The eleven chapters in this volume present persuasive arguments that the internationalization of educational policy has a wide and irreversible effect on schooling and society around...

This volume of "International Perspectives on Education and Society" investigates the changing face of educational leadership from comparative and international perspectives. Various definitions of leadership have transformed the way that educators around the world think about teaching, administration, and policy in recent years. Yet, there is relatively little known about how educational leadership works in many specific systems, cultures and societies around the world. And, much of the published research and literature on educational leadership focuses on only a handful of countries and...

The 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union is a time to reflect and call attention to the educational transformations in post-socialist nations of Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and in educational systems around the world. While the educational landscape changed most obviously in the former socialist countries and aligned nations, the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union was felt in nations worldwide. This volume will provide a comparative account of the meanings and processes of post-socialist transformations in education by exploring recent...

Since the IEA's first international studies on mathematics and science achievement in the late 1960s, the availability and use of international achievement studies around the world has exploded. The most widely adopted studies, PISA and TIMSS, are now administered regularly and include participating countries from every region around the world. These international studies, now include cross-national studies of multiple subject areas, teachers and teaching, and a developing focus on higher education. This information has been used to make decisions about resource distribution both within and...

This volume of the "International Perspectives on Education and Society" series examines the transformation of education policy in China, with a special emphasis on transformations in the post-1978 period. While educational policy has experienced major shifts and reversals since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the late 1970s and the early 1980s signalled a significant shift in China's openness and willingness to make widespread and rapid changes in education to meet the demands of an increasingly market-oriented economy. These educational policy changes are...

This inaugural volume is a forum for stakeholders and scholars to examine current trends and identify future directions in comparative and international education, using several essays as a context for discussion and analysis. Contributors address the questions and themes discussed in these essays including: the use of new conceptual or methodological frameworks; the role of CIE in teacher education and higher education; the emergence of new area studies, and diversification of the field to include human rights. The volume provides an analytic overview of published work in the field, with...

The internationally comparative perspective of the volume will frame educational innovation and social entrepreneurship using both the globalization and contextualization of educational quality and opportunity in disadvantaged communities worldwide as a foundation. Through the use of both empirical research reports and case study examples, this volume will examine the contributions of social entrepreneurs through educational programs, projects and systems worldwide, and how the social, cultural and political communities in each nation contextualize educational innovations. Chapters will...

Teacher effectiveness and teacher quality have become the focus of intense international attention and concern. Around the world, governments are modifying existing certification requirements or implementing value-added modeling in order to qualify teachers without planning for the long-term consequences of these actions. The book brings together scholars from multi-disciplinary and international backgrounds to address two critical areas: (1) what existing cross-national measures of teacher effectiveness and teacher quality are most promising, and how can these be aligned to maximize their...