Given its importance and value in ensuring quality education, the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) of teachers draws significant attention from researchers. Research has thus focused on teachers' CPD practices and the factors influencing those practices. However, a broad theoretical framework that relates teacher CPD participation factors…

Duverger's Law--the principle that first-past-the-post systems tend to promote two major political parties while proportional representation systems tend to promote multipartism--is a commonly taught topic in introductory and some upper-level political science courses across subfields. However, it also contains concepts that are difficult for…

Can teachers promote true economic understanding among students by adding a dose of psychology? Fans of behavioral economics, with its unique blend of psychology and economics, think so. Blending a bit of behavioral economics into social studies lessons provides answers to the ever-present questions that permeate every classroom,"What does…

Schools and their development as sustainable assessment cultures requires insight into the interests and role of different stakeholders: school policy makers, teachers and their teaching teams, principals, parents, pupils and the local community. Researchers are not immediately included in this list, but as external advisers they can play a…

The rich body of literature that has sought to shed light on how global trends shape public sector institutions at the local level frequently claims that globalization is significantly transforming national institutions. Against that backdrop, the term "governance" is actually a multifaceted concept representing an ongoing process…

We define a "hot potato" to be a good that may be traded a finite number of times, but which becomes a bad if and when it can no longer be exchanged. We describe a game involving such goods, and show that non-acceptance is a unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium for rational egoists. Contrastingly, experiments with human subjects show…

Discusses theory/policies supporting zero tolerance policy in schools, including rational choice theory in criminology and national crime policies based on deterrence. Potential consequences of zero tolerance policy implementation are described and shown to involve outcomes similar to those identified by researchers studying national crime policy.…

Theories of rational choice often make the structural consistency assumption that every decision maker's binary strict preference among choice alternatives forms a "strict weak order". Likewise, the very concept of a "utility function" over lotteries in normative, prescriptive, and descriptive theory is mathematically equivalent to strict weak…

Many of the resources developed to promote the use of evidence in policy aspire to an ideal of rational decision making, yet their basis in the decision sciences is often unclear. Tracing the historical development of evidence-informed policy to its roots in "evidence-based medicine" (EBM), we distinguish between two understandings of…

Presents results of a study examining the comparative effects of school (system) determinants on the educational careers of minority students in the Netherlands, drawing on rational choice and empowerment theories. Results indicate the importance of a school policy aimed at improving minority student achievement. Pull-out programs are detrimental,…

By the year 2000, the management of education in England had lost much of its capacity to ensure the commitment of headteachers and teachers. As market forces engendered competition among schools, the bureaucratic monitoring of schools by agencies of government increased on the grounds that objective and comparable data about schools should be…

Recent years have witnessed a surge of studies examining the scope of professional responsibility. Building on these efforts, this conceptual inquiry explores whether Nussbaum's notion of a 'decent society', grounded in the premises of equal respect for persons and different conceptions of the good, and thus aspiring to afford all its members a…

As relatively new philosophical discipline, business ethics has sprang out from the business practice in the last quarter of the 20th century. Business ethics is focused on evaluation of business conduction of both individuals and corporations in the business world. Nowadays, in the public and academic milieu of the modern Western societies…

The authors investigate the strategic rationale behind the message sent by Osama bin Laden on the eve of the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections. They model this situation as a signaling game in which a population of receivers takes a binary choice, the outcome is decided by majority rule, sender and receivers have conflicting interests, and there is…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to know the extent to which a decision-making framework assists in providing holistic, comprehensive descriptions of strategies used by school leaders engaging with distributed leadership practices. The process by which principals and other education leaders interact various school-based actors to arrive at a…