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…

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…