Reviews and assesses numerous educational policy statements of East African countries. Policy outcomes do not match expectations, mainly because of insufficient or no implementation. The reason for failure: vaguely stated policies and incompletely analyzed financing implications. Pleads for more concrete, feasible policies based on documented…

Examining the ways in which Western European countries have presented and justified educational reform, Neave explores the shift in values and social ethics that occupy the center of the educational stage. States that education is less a part of social policy, but is increasingly viewed as a sub-sector of economic policy. (GEA)

Examining early Soviet educational policy, Lauglo analyzes the initial expression of Marxist humanist values, popular participation, and the value of productive work for general education. Discusses the routinization into a Stalinist pattern of bureaucratically controlled utilitarianism and comments briefly on recent indications of change in…

Demonstrates that the common procedure of using examination results as performance indicators based upon residuals from regression analysis when applied to aggregated data gives unstable results. Suggests that aggregate-level analyses are uninformative and that useful comparisons cannot be obtained without employing multilevel analyses using…

The London Education Authority (LEA) stresses the importance of developing the interface between quantitative models of assessment and qualitative assessments, describing an interdisciplinary approach to the development of models of educational accountability, recommends an alternative method, data envelopment analysis, and compares it to the…

Argues that much of the current management literature in education is fundamentally flawed and ethically unpalatable because its current stress upon effectiveness omits attention to the intrinsic worth of education. Attacks as ethically unacceptable current suggestions that educational practitioners and recipients are to be viewed in an…

Reflecting on obsessional play objects of infants, Hodgkin suggests that a proper understanding of these "transitional" or "cognitive" objects could lead to an educational model of a "learner" involving a number of human competencies, all developing synergistically. Contends that such a model may be truer to life than the more unified and…

Great Britain's changeover to comprehensive schools has been called one of its most significant developments in secondary education. A description and comparison of four studies which evaluated secondary students' academic performance under this comprehensive system shows that there is an overriding need for more and better information concerning…

Three British studies recently compared the examination results of pupils from comprehensive schools with those of selective schools. Each study reached somewhat contrasting conclusions. Major differences among the studies are discussed in order to clarify reasons for the contrasting interpretations and to illustrate the major difficulties in…

An analysis of data showed that British students in local education authorities which have retained selection to a greater or lesser extent did not achieve better examination results than students in those authorities which have gone fully comprehensive. (RM)

Discussed are the assumptions which underpin research studies of the effects of pupil, school, and local education authority characteristics on student achievement in Great Britain. The purpose is to clarify the necessary limitations on knowledge imposed by various research methods and to suggest how these might be improved. (RM)

An examination of the technical and theoretical strengths and weaknesses of three British research studies on the effectiveness of selective and nonselective schooling shows that the reorganization of British schools has not produced the lowering of educational standards that politically motivated groups would like people to believe. (RM)

An analysis of three research studies which examined the movement towards comprehensive schooling in Great Britain shows that the answer to the question "has it worked" can be yes or no, depending on the selection of data and of statistical techniques. (RM)

Although British teachers of English, French, physics, and mathematics were somewhat successful in identifying students with high subject-specific ability, inappropriate influences were at work in coloring their judgment. These influences, however, were not so strong as to lead to gross misjudgment. (RM)

British comprehensive schools have been criticized by the left for failing to provide equality for everyone and by the right for sacrificing academic standards for equality. Such simultaneous criticisms suggest that the schools have been assigned either impossible or contradictory objectives, but have managed to achieve a reasonable compromise.…