Research capacity building and its impact on policy and practice are increasingly highlighted in the literature on international research partnerships. In the field of education and development, it is recognised that, in the past, international research collaborations have tended to be dominated by the agenda of Northern partners. Partly in…

In sub-Saharan Africa, education conducted through a European language is associated with low school achievement. Both teachers and learners may often not be fluent enough to use the language as a medium of instruction. In these circumstances, both also make use of a common African language. They switch between two languages in the plenary…

Previous studies on the role of the school in influencing attainment in South African schools have concluded that the inequalities which are known to exist in these are still largely due to the legacy of the Apartheid system. More recently, policy focus has been on narrowing the gap between the attainment of different socio-economic groups by…

Chinese and Russian universities are increasingly drawn into center-periphery repositioning, as they compete for symbolic, financial, and intellectual resources locally and globally. However, their strategies on national and institutional linkages differ with regards to the individual scientist's powers in knowledge production. As global…

This article examines the relationship of wartime experience and reintegration supports to students' risk of school dropout. It draws on longitudinal, mixed-methods data collected among children and youth in Sierra Leone from 2002 through 2008. The study finds that family financial support and perceived social support are positively…

In this article, we explore how the World Bank operationalizes its focus on poverty alleviation in one of the most controversial arenas of educational change: the expansion of privately provided schooling. We argue that the Bank's role in promoting private provision has been far more complicated than most critics have discerned. It has…

The Israeli Ministry of Education has recently initiated a program of reform in the training of public school principals that aims to expand state licensing regulations for educational leaders. This article suggests that the principals' training and licensing (PTL) reform should be linked to the attempt by Israeli policy makers to…

Comparative and international studies of education that focus on policy borrowing and transfer must be expanded to account for aspects of what Terence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers call "global norm-making." Such an approach examines how global policies are refracted within divergent but interrelated sociopolitical and economic contexts,…

Contextualized in China's social change of the past half-century, this article conceptualizes the two aspects of China's rural-urban divide in educational inequality--the household registration system ("hukou") assigns people to a hierarchy, and the rural-urban schooling system institutionalizes unequal resource distribution…

Meisei Gakuen, a private school for the deaf in Tokyo, is the only school for the deaf in Japan that uses Japanese Sign Language (JSL) as the primary language of instruction and social interaction. We see Meisei as a useful case for bringing out core issues in Japanese deaf and early childhood education, as well as for making larger arguments…

This article examines Minzu University of China (MUC), the nation's leading ethnic minority university, relative to faculty perspectives regarding initiatives to strengthen MUC as a comprehensive university. Based on a case-study approach, and employing organizational culture as a theoretical lens, the authors identify three narratives of…

The aim of this article is to examine how European universities, confronted with national reforms of their governance, have tried to resolve the dilemmas traditionally associated with internal reorganization, the redistribution of power, and the reformulation of teaching and research policies. The article does not focus on the central governance…

Using PISA data for 16 Western OECD countries having comprehensive school systems, we explore the conditions under which the socioeconomic composition of schools affects educational efficiency and equality, to a greater or lesser extent. First, a multilevel analysis is applied to examine and compare the effect of school socioeconomic composition…

This study developed a framework that compares the content and purposes of "federal" level European Union (EU) and United States (US) e-learning policy to ascertain trends, patterns, and points of convergence and divergence across the years 1994-2010. It reveals that the EU and US are applying similar rhetoric for policy framing,…

The authors argue for a critical spatial perspective in comparative and international education. We briefly summarize how time and space have been conceptualized within our field. We then review mainstream social science literature that reflects a metanarrative, which we critique for contributing to false dichotomies between space and place and…