This article shows how patronage politics affects a popular international education model: community-managed schools (CMS). Focusing on Honduras's CMS initiative, PROHECO (Programa Hondureno de Educacion Comunitaria), I demonstrate how patronage can undermine CMS accountability. Whereas supporters argue that CMS increases accountability, partisan…

We assess explanations for the associations between cultural capital (especially cultural activities and cultural possessions) and educational performance of schooled adolescents in 22 Western industrialized countries based on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We further ascertain variations in the effect of…

World culture theory seeks to explain an apparent convergence of education through a neoinstitutionalist lens, seeing global rationalization in education as driven by the logic of science and the myth of progress. While critics have challenged these assumptions by focusing on local manifestations of world-level tendencies, such critique is…

For years social science researchers have bemoaned their lack of impact on educational policy. The general view is that policy makers respond to urgent problems with ad hoc solutions and without evidence of what works. It has also become fashionable among comparativists to argue that little learning occurs at the local level but that innovations…

The domain of national education systems has been identified as one of the richest areas for exploring questions about globalization, particularly the degree of worldwide convergence in educational institutions. This article addresses questions about the transnational production and institutionalization of educational models through a historical…

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…

Recently, Latin America has seen the advent of research activities to meet the call for research that long preceded them and of the full-time research faculty who engage in them. These developments have taken place as the region partakes in contemporary worldwide trends that have affected universities elsewhere: the consequences of the increased…

This article builds on previous comparative education research by analyzing the current discourse surrounding this emerging education model--human rights education. The first section provides a brief history of human rights education in formal education. The second section reviews research on international reforms, emphasizing analyses of…

Examines three international comparative research projects in higher education, commissioned by the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (Netherlands). Develops a model of the influence of research on various stages of the educational policy process, focusing on three uses of research: enlightenment, political decision making, and problem…

Examines the educational change process in the Czech Republic since 1989, focusing on persistence of past attitudes, change complexity, external factors facilitating change, role of national reform organizations, absence of conceptually coherent educational policy, growing advocacy for special education, and parent and teacher attitudes. Explores…

Points out that the field of comparative education has lost its comparative focus, and proposes that comparative research refocus on variations among national institutional patterns of education. Examines characteristics of six core patterns developed in Prussia, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and Russia. Outlines 10…

A model of the dynamics of educational change links teaching style (on a continuum from didactic to interactive) with basis of authority (from formal to organic). The model is used to analyze educational decentralization in Mexico, examining four strategies: school "technical councils," inservice teacher education about reform implementation, a…

Defines and broadly traces the history of educational planning in both developing and industrialized capitalist nations. Discusses general approaches to educational planning (technical versus political planning, top-down versus bottom-up planning, and various theoretical bases); the contingency view of planning; case examples of planned,…

Focuses on the relationship between schooling and occupation in Uganda in the ten years prior to and the ten years after independence in 1962. (Author/RK)

Examines the hypothesis that family origins will be of substantially greater import in determining the formation of aspirations than will ability and performance in Brazil. Presents data to evaluate the adequacy of the first stages of the Sewell and associates social psychological model of status attainment for Brazil. (Author/RK)