This study proposes an elaboration of the human development capability approach by theorizing empowerment capabilities as an essential aspect of the education of excluded village girls. Seeking to explain Chinese village girls' demand for schooling, the article identifies intangible and instrumental capabilities that have often been…

The Education Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education (UPE) states that "by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling." The 2008 midterm Global Monitoring Report claims that "A country's distance from UPE appears most clearly in terms of the…

Since the 1940s, the concept of community participation has framed, mobilized, and legitimated national development agendas in the Singida Region of rural central Tanzania. Based on 19 months of ethnographic and archival research, this study examines the forms of community participation elicited through state and international development…

This article presents a research which examines the impact of religion, gender, and parental socioeconomic status on school attendance in Nigeria. Researchers found that both gender and parental socioeconomic status have significant impacts on school attendance. Although gender is an important determinant of school attendance, indicators of…

This article provides background on the education of ethnic minorities in China, as well as education in Tibet, and is followed by a review of the origin and development of boarding schools for Tibetan students. The article also examines the experiences and reflections of Tibetan students and their families. Data are partially derived from the…

In this article, the author compares the ways in which parent-child communication--a major indicator of parental involvement--influences children's educational achievement across 14 countries. Using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the author examines the extent to which social class differences in the effect of…

School systems worldwide respond in particular ways to students' academic heterogeneity, and different countries have developed different strategies to manage such heterogeneity. Whereas some countries separate children according to distinctive educational routes (or tracks) at early ages, others rely on intensive use of grade retention, while…

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…

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…

In this article the authors examine the remittance interpretation for parents' selective investment in boys' education in sub-Saharan contexts. Using evidence from several African countries, they compare the relative capacity of married women versus men to assist their respective families of origin. They measure this capacity by women's leverage…

The importance of the authors' research can be summarized in several ways. First, it contributes to an ongoing discussion about the relative importance of childbearing in determining a girl's life chances, particularly in societies undergoing major transitions. Second, the twin issues of adolescent fertility and educational attainment feature…

Women's schooling is associated with much of the world's improvement in child survival and maternal and child health since 1960. Evidence for these associations is widely interpreted as representing a causal influence of formal education on health. The relationships of variations in female school attendance at the levels of individuals,…

To examine the impact of school incentive programs on children's time allocation, this article reports the authors' investigation of time-use data collected in two Bangladeshi villages in 1992, 1995, and 1996; in-depth interviews conducted in 1995; responses to two village censuses collected in 1992 and 1995; and data from an education survey…

Twentieth-century data on the numbers of students completing university matriculation examinations in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden were used to study the expansion of secondary academic education. The long-term regularity in the expansion and the differential growth curve for the two sexes suggest that the state was not…

Analysis of household survey data in Nepal showed that despite rapid educational expansion during 1965-79, enrollment gaps between boys and girls and among castes did not narrow. The likelihood that girls would enter school was not increased by either high socioeconomic status or urban residence, but once enrolled, girls were as likely as boys to…