There is ample evidence to suggest that American schools perform worse than schools in many other countries. The U.S. ranks toward the bottom of the industrialized nations on international tests of academic achievement in science and mathematics. Not only may American schools perform worse but they may do so at the same time as they use more…

Corruption was symptomatic of business and government interactions in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union before and during the economic transition of the 1990s. Corruption is difficult to quantify, but the perception of corruption is quantifiable. Nations can even be arranged along a hierarchy by the degree to which they are…

In this article, the authors examine the role of education in the maintenance of social cohesion and the formation of new identities amid the economic decline and political volatility of six new nations: Azerbaijan, in the southern Caucasus, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. The authors first…

Since 1990 the education development community has focused on a strategy titled: Education for All. This article argues that, as political strategy, it has been a failure. The article explains why and suggests ways to correct the problem.

Universities may contribute to a nation's social cohesion through both direct and indirect means. In their syllabi they may include techniques necessary for understanding complex social problems. Faculty may model good behaviour in terms of listening and understanding points of view that may contradict their own. University administrators may…

This study correlated socioeconomic status as measured by parents' education and material prosperity, with academic achievement and self-confidence scores in 2293 Ugandan students. Self confidence did not correlate to socioeconomic status, as it has been found to do in industrialized societies. Possible reasons for this difference are considered.…

This study of 61 Ugandan primary schools examined both pupil characteristics (socioeconomic status, ability, health) and school characteristics (textbook availability, teacher language ability, school physical facilities) to determine which school resources account for the impact of schools on learning. (Author/SJL)

Quality of schools is a critical resource in the production of school achievement, individual and national. Countries with a scarcity of resources (transportation, administration, and management) would be expected to perform worse in distributing any resource, especially one of such complexity as school quality, but this does not seem to occur.…

A past president of the Comparative and International Education Society discusses increases in comparative education research and international cooperative educational projects; the unreliability of educational statistics worldwide; "paradigm wars" and other sources of intellectual gridlock in the university-based research community; and the…