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,…

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…

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,…

Education systems worldwide have served as a nation-building apparatus and national consciousness facilitators since the appearance of the modern nation-state. With the emergence of globalization in recent decades, however, a growing presence of cosmopolitanism and internationalization can be traced in education policy and school curricula.…

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 study investigates the chances of gaining admission to Georgian higher education in relation to residential origin. The analysis of broad trends is combined with details from an in-depth individual-level inquiry. Qualitative data on the entire population of 150,000 applicants over the period 2005-9, together with interview data from a…

This article discusses admissions policies to higher education during the Communist regime in Bulgaria (1946-89). It argues that under the conditions of the Bulgarian Communist regime, admissions policies were not only a component of the higher education system--viewed as an institution--but part and parcel of the process through which power was…

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 investigates Iraqi schooling during the 1990s under Ba'thist rule and after the regime's fall in 2003 and compares the treatment of Islam in the curriculum. I focus on the degree to which Iraqi textbooks under Saddam Hussein contained a Sunni bias and the changes introduced immediately after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in…

That school grounds, students, and staff can become tactical targets for parties in conflict is widely accepted as a fact by analysts of education and conflict. However, our understanding of the motivations for such targeting remains limited, as does our ability to engage with this matter through policy. In this article we explore tactical…

This article uses multiple perspectives to frame international processes of education policy formation and then applies the framework to El Salvador's Plan 2021 between 2003 and 2005. These perspectives are policy attraction, policy negotiation, policy imposition, and policy hybridization. Research reveals that the formation of Plan 2021 was the…

This study investigates the extent to which national educational policy factors can explain differences in the probability of students repeating a grade in primary and lower-secondary education across OECD member countries. Data from the PISA 2009 study, the OECD "Education at a Glance" brochures, and the TALIS 2007 study were analyzed by means of…

South Africa's democratic transition was a time of optimism, with immense hopes pinned on the youth who would be educated to see themselves as equal citizens. It was also a time of pragmatic decision making, not least in the education sector, which would shape the future of the country. Negotiating the imperatives of redress, development, and…