Not surprisingly, in an increasingly neo-liberal context of international competition for educational prestige, conversations about teaching and teacher preparation have taken hold across the globe. Further complicating these matters is that ideas about teaching, learning, and learning to teach cannot be understood or analyzed in a vacuum; that…

Most qualitative studies in international education take place in a single site in a single nation. When studies are of more than one country, they most often use more quantitative than qualitative approaches. Beatrice and John Whiting conducted the most systematic of comparative cross-cultural studies of child rearing in their "Six…

Globalization is profoundly altering the education policy landscape. It introduces new problems in education agendas, compresses time and space in policy processes, and revitalizes the role of a range of supra-national players in educational reform. This deterritorialization of the education policy process has important theoretical and…

The Teachers College Symposium invited scholars to rethink culture, context, and comparison in educational research. In his response to these questions (this volume), Joe Tobin promoted comparative ethnographies to understand how social, cultural, and political processes play out across multiple locations and time periods. He urged careful…

Because educational research has grown more global in nature over the course of the last few decades, researchers find themselves questioning how best to conceptualize content and establish distinct levels in educational research. Globalization has exacerbated the need to rethink culture and context, to understand how and why similar content are,…

This article problematizes some of the ways that the issue of "context" has been treated in comparative education scholarship. We critique the cube approach recommended by Bray and Thomas (1995) as well as the common recirculations of Sadler's (1900) garden metaphor. Borrowing a set of analytic concepts from Bruno Latour (2004), we…

School choice policies, as neoliberal reforms, have often been analyzed using the very discourse embedded in neoliberal mentalities. By reviewing the way scholars have conceptualized school choice as a transnational phenomenon, this paper evaluates the extent to which scholarship has attempted to, or succeeded in, overcoming traditional,…

The past decade has witnessed a notable shift in the international education policy environment, characterized by a rapid growth in private educational provision. In the context of a divisive debate on the role of the non-state sector in primary and secondary education, this paper grapples with the theoretical underpinnings of both advocacy and…

There is ample evidence to suggest that American schools perform worse than schools in many other countries. The U.S. ranks toward the bottom of the industrialized nations on international tests of academic achievement in science and mathematics. Not only may American schools perform worse but they may do so at the same time as they use more…

This article explores the approach to transformative education utilized by Sadaka Reut, a binational civil society organization in Israel that works with Jewish and Palestinian youth. I examine three central tools Sadaka Reut uses to achieve its goal of educating youth for social change: using personal experiences as the basis for discussion;…

Drawing upon recent work for the Commonwealth Secretariat and our ongoing comparative research, this article focuses upon the nature, impact and implications of contemporary development challenges for education in small states. It is argued that the post-Jomtien era has been dominated by international goals and targets that have focussed…

This article analyses the institutional power of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the process of education policy formation in El Salvador during 2003-2005. The results show how bi- and multi-lateral institutions are able to leverage financial and intellectual capital to guide the policymaking process and sway…

Between 1960 and 2010, Singapore's real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita skyrocketed from $4,383 to $55,862, while Jamaica's barely increased from $6,417 to $8,539. It is plausible that differing rates of GDP growth are associated with differences in the development of education systems but causally the linkage is not well understood. Using…

China's heated education policy climate in 2010 indicated an increasing national concern for improving educational quality and educational quality assessment. Despite glowing portraits of Chinese education painted by international observers, the Chinese public has expressed consistent dissatisfaction with educational quality. The inter-related…

Two of the main obstacles for drawing educational comparisons consist in determining what are considered "high quality" initiatives, and finding a common tool that can adapt to differences in both structure and content, as well as to the cultural and demographic characteristics of the population it wishes to serve. This paper focuses on addressing…