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,…

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…

The world environmental movement has gained much strength in recent decades and has led many nations to focus on environmental education. We examine the extent to which this global movement has helped change national textbooks. We also consider the effects of national development, national policy on environmentalism, and the general expansion of…

What happens to traditional civic notions of nation, national identity, and constitutional rights when national curricula incorporate ideas of global citizenship, other national identities, diversity, and human rights? Using a longitudinal, mixed-methods approach, we address this issue by analyzing the nature of changes in South Korean civic…

The role played by family background in educational opportunity is a central focus in the sociology of education and stratification. Scholars have long recognized the importance of families in determining their children's educational success and, thus, in reproducing status over the generations. In the United States, children from single-parent…

Gender gaps in academic achievement have long captured the attention of educational researchers. Although studies from laboratory experiments have reported relatively consistent gender differences in cognitive skills over the decades, investigations done in schools have uncovered dramatic changes. In the United States, educational studies from the…

The distribution of knowledge is directly connected to the publishing industry. Who gets published, where the article appears, the distribution of the journal itself, and publishing influences directly affect how knowledge is disseminated. The 2007 "Comparative Education Review" ("CER") bibliography begins to question these patterns in terms of…

This second moderated discussion by the Comparative Education Review (CER) in part grows out of a symposium, "Past CIES Presidents Discuss the Value of Comparative and International Education Post-9/11," organized by then-President-Elect Kassie Freeman at the March 2003 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) annual meeting. The…

This study explores China's educational policies for ethnic minorities in one particular academic setting, the Central University for Nationalities (CUN) in Beijing, and how these policies are experienced by the students who are supposed to benefit from them. The study takes an emic perspective by looking at the perceptions of minority students at…

In recent years, many scholars have become fascinated by a contemporary, multidimensional process that has come to be known as "globalization." Globalization originally described economic developments at the world level. More specifically, scholars invoked the concept in reference to the process of global economic integration and the seemingly…

In this article, the authors propose to take advantage of detailed data on Egyptian public schools (grades 6-8, the last 3 years of the 8-year compulsory schooling sequence) that were collected in conjunction with a national survey of Egyptian adolescents. The school data were collected in a subsample of the primary sampling units used for the…

Detailed discourse analysis is presented for two articles that suggest that postmodernism has little to offer comparative education and should be resisted. The two texts, focusing on postmodernism as the antithesis of comparative education and on the "lost promise" of postmodernism, demonstrate the use of language to convey messages that limit or…

College students' bewildered reaction to September 11 demonstrates what's missing from their education: empathy and an ethic of care. Eleven genres of relational theories are examined; these theories of the "space between us" offer complex conceptualizations of democracy, globalization, connection, and difference. Deliberative examination and…

South African development and education policy documents were analyzed to examine postapartheid government goals concerning educational equality and social justice. Documents concerning equity of educational access, quality, outcomes, and governance reveal a shift from a populist social-democratic orientation to a conservative neoliberal position,…

Examines the limited communication between educational theorists and researchers, on the one hand, and policy makers and practitioners, on the other. Discounts the "two cultures" thesis for explaining the communication gap, arguing that the groups are heterogeneous and overlap. Discusses six approaches to closing the communication gap, and…