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David P. Baker is a Professor of Education and Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also the associate director of the Social Science Research Institute. He publishes widely on the comparative analysis of education and stratification, and the global impact of education as an institution. Recent publications include “Student Victimization: National and School System Effects on School Violence in 37 Nations” (American Journal of Education Research, 2002) and “Socio-Economic Status, School Quality, and National Economic Development: A Cross-National Analysis of the ‘Heyneman-Loxley Effect’ on Mathematics and Science Achievement” (Comparative Education Review, 2002).Aaron Benavot is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Grounded in an institutional approach to education and development, his research has examined historical and cross-national patterns in official school curricula, the consequences of educational expansion on economic development and democratization, the economic impacts of curricular contents, and the origins and expansion of mass education. He is currently studying the diversification of educational knowledge in local Israeli schools and also the dynamics of transnational social science research projects in the European Union.Karen Bradley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University. Her research examines women’s participation in higher education cross-nationally. Recent publications include “Equal but Separate? A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Maria Charles, American Sociological Review, 2002) and “The Incorporation of Women into Higher Education: Paradoxical Outcomes?” (Sociology of Education, 2000). She is currently collaborating with Maria Charles on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and the American Educational Research Association that examines factors underlying women’s underrepresentation in engineering and math/computer science programs in several countries.Wendy Cadge is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University. Her research focuses on the cultural aspects of globalization in the United States and Southeast Asia. Her first book, Heartwood: the First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.Maria Charles is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Her research explores how cultural ideologies and social structures affect the economic and social status of individuals and groups. Most recently, Charles is author of “Deciphering Sex Segregation: Vertical and Horizontal Inequalities in Ten Countries” (Acta Sociologica 46:265–286, 2003), and coauthor of Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (with David Grusky, Stanford University Press, in press) and “Equal but Separate: A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Karen Bradley, American Sociology Review 67: 573–599, 2002).Chang Y. Chung is a Statistical Programmer at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of South Carolina and M.S.E. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He is involved in multiple research projects as statistical programmer, data manager, and co-author. A recent publication is “Employment and Earnings of Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers in U.S. Labor Markets” (with Thomas Espenshade and Margaret Usdansky, Population Research and Policy Review, 2001).Sara R. Curran is an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sociology at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has research interests in demography, migration, gender, economic development, environment, aging and Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a book, Shifting Boundaries, Transforming Lives: Globalization, Gender, and Family in Thailand. Recent publications include: Ambio. Special Issue: Population, Consumption, and Environment, (with Tundi Agardy, 2002) and “Engendering Migrant Networks: The Case of Mexican Migration,” (with Estela Rivero Fuentes, Demography, 2003).Bruce Fuller is a Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the dilemmas around the decentering of public aims and institutions within the worlds of child care, family welfare, and school reform. Prior to becoming a full-time teacher, he worked for a state legislature, a governor, and then as a heretical sociologist at the World Bank. His most recent books are Inside Charter Schools: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization (Harvard, 2000), and Government Confronts Culture (Taylor & Francis, 1999).Emily Hannum is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on education, poverty, and social inequality, particularly in China. Recent publications include “Ethnic Differences in Basic Education in Reform-Era Rural China” (Demography, 2002) and “Education and Stratification in Developing Countries: A Review of Theories and Empirical Research” (with Claudia Buchmann, Annual Review of Sociology, 2001). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and National Institutes of Health that investigates factors in the family, school, and community that support rural children’s education and healthy development in Northwest China.Nabil Khattab completed his Ph.D. at the University of Jerusalem. He is currently a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester. His main areas of interest are sociology of education, the ethnic and gender aspects of the labor market, and social inequality. His most recent publication is “Segregation, Ethnic Labor Market, and the Occupational Expectations of Palestinian Students in Israel” (The British Journal of Sociology, 2003). In his current project, he is looking at the labor market prospects for Pakistani-Bangladeshi women in the U.K. and Muslim women in Israel.Patricia McManus is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research centers on gender and family inequality under advanced capitalism. She will spend 2003–2004 in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute’s Center for the Study of Sociology and the Life Course, where she will study welfare state policy and married women’s work careers in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Current projects also include a study of the impact of residential mobility on gender inequality within households (with Claudia Geist), and a cross-national comparison of the wage penalties for motherhood in the United States and Germany (with Markus Gangl).Stephen L. Morgan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, sociology of education, and methodology. Recent publications include “Modeling Preparatory Commitment and Non-Repeatable Decisions: Information Processing, Preference Formation and Educational Attainment” (Rationality and Society, 2002) and “Counterfactuals, Causal Effect Heterogeneity, and the Catholic School Effect on Learning” (Sociology of Education, 2001). His current projects include studies of black-white differences in educational achievement and changes in labor market inequality in the 1980s and 1990s.William R. Morgan is a Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. He has been studying and developing education in northern Nigeria over a period of 25 years. In Cleveland, he recently completed data collection for a seven-year study of the impact of the treatment and recovery process for cocaine-addicted women on their children’s development, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. His new project is a pilot study of the peer recruitment method to deliver HIV/AIDS education to networks of high-risk adolescents and young women.Hiroshi Ono is an Assistant Professor at the European Institute of Japanese Studies, Stockholm School of Economics. He is interested in social stratification and inequality, and the sociology and economics of education, family, and work. Currently he is working on two projects. The first is examining Internet inequality in five countries, and the second is comparing human resource practices between foreign-owned versus domestic firms in Japan. His recent publications include “College Quality and Earnings in the Japanese Labor Market” (forthcoming, Industrial Relations), and “Gender and the Internet” (with Madeline Zavodny, Social Science Quarterly, 2003).Hyunjoon Park, a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is interested in social stratification, education, and health inequality with a particular focus on East Asian countries. His current project examines the process of the transition to adulthood among Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese young people across several dimensions, including educational and occupational attainment, and family formation. Two forthcoming publications include “Intergenerational Social Mobility among Korean Men: In Comparative Perspective” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2003), and “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Voluntary and Involuntary Job Mobility among Young Men” (with Gary Sandefur, Social Science Research, 2003).Susan E. Short is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She specializes in family sociology, social demography, and social inequality. Recent coauthored publications include “Use of Maternity Services in Rural China” (Population Studies, forthcoming); “Maternal Work and Time Spent in Child Care in China: A Multimethod Approach” (Population and Development Review, 2002); “China’s One-Child Policy and the Care of Children: An Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data” (Social Forces, 2001); and “Birth Planning and Sterilization in China” (Population Studies, 2000). In on-going research, funded by the NICHD, she examines the consequences of China’s one-child policy for child well-being.Rongjun Sun is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. His research focuses on population aging, and family relations in both the United States and China. Recent publications include “Old Age Support in Urban China from both Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives” (Research on Aging, 2002) and “Community-Acquired Pneumonia in Older Veterans: Does the Pneumonia Prognosis Index Help?” (with Lona Mody and Suzanne Bradley, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2002). He is currently studying the mortality of the oldest-old in China.Anchalee Varangrat is a Lecturer at the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Thailand. Her research focuses on family formation, population, and development. She is the author of Population Projection for Thailand, 2000–2025 (Thailand Ministry of Public Health and Mahidol University, 2003). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Wellcome Trust on factors affecting Thai marriage patterns.Regina E. Werum is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Her research focuses on educational inequality from comparative historical and international perspectives. Recent publications include “Warehousing the Unemployed? Federal Job Training Programs in the Depression-Era South” (American Journal of Education, 2001), and a forthcoming chapter with B. Powell and L. Steelman titled, “Macro Causes, Micro Effects: Linking Public Policy, Family Structure, and Educational Outcomes” (in After the Bell: Educational Solutions Outside of School, edited by D. Conley). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the NAE/Spencer Foundation and NSF that investigates cross-cultural differences in how social capital affects academic outcomes.Raymond Sin-Kwok Wong is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include inequality and stratification, sociology of education, quantitative methodology, urban poverty, and economic sociology, particularly Chinese entrepreneurship in East Asia. His recent publications include “Multidimensional Association Models: A Multilinear Approach” (Sociological Methods & Research, 2001), “Occupational Attainment in Eastern Europe Under Socialism” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2002), and “Chinese Business Firms and Business Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong” (De-Essentializing Capitalism: Chinese Enterprise, Transnationalism, and Identity, edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, 2003).Gad Yair is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include the sociology of schools and schooling, organizational theory, the sociology of learning, sociological theory and its history, and the theory-methodology nexus. Recent relevant publications are “Educational Battlefields in America: The Tug-of-War over Students’ Engagement With Instruction” (Sociology of Education, 2000) and “Decisive Moments and Key Experiences: Expanding Paradigmatic Boundaries in the Study of School Effects” in The International Handbook on the Sociology of Education: An International Assessment of New Research and Theory, 2003).

Prior research shows that stratification of future adult opportunities influences stratification in the academic performance of students. This perspective is used to generate hypotheses regarding the sources of cross-national gender differences in mathematics performance. These hypotheses are tested using multivariate and multilevel analyses of adult opportunities for women and cross-national differences in mathematics performance by gender. This future opportunity perspective is expanded to take into account the historical incorporation of women in modern nation-states through institutionalized mass schooling emphasizing egalitarian ideals. Results indicate a cross-national shift in the direction of less gender inequality in overall school mathematics performance. However, gender inequality is more evident in the advanced 12th grade mathematics. The results of a more specialized analysis of the advanced 12th grade mathematics are compared with the earlier findings regarding mathematics performance.

Conventional wisdom has it that policymakers rationally approach an ongoing or potential problem, carefully consider the reasons for the problem, and then sensibly debate the information and research on this problem. The final stage of this ideal vision of the educational policymaking process is that the policymakers decide how to solve specific problems based on their consideration of all of the relevant data and possible options (Vickers, 1994). This is rarely, if ever, the case.

As guest editors, we welcomed the opportunity to help compile a volume that reflects current trends in cross-national analyses of educational stratification. Our interest in macro-comparative stratification research stems from a shared dissatisfaction with the extensive amount of research on schooling and social stratification exclusively on American education. Of course, studying what is close at hand is less complicated (and less fraught with data limitations), and investigations of a single nation or society often provide the basis for more or less universal generalizations.

Understanding of the effects of formal education on HIV/AIDS infection in South Saharan Africa (SSA) has been a complex task because consecutive waves of research offer different, seemingly contradictory results and explanations of what exactly are the schooling effects on HIV/AIDS and the causal mechanisms driving those effects. This chapter concentrates on the narrative and implications of the key substantive findings from a multidisciplinary scientific team that was formed to explore the precise nature of the relationship between population education and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in SSA and to determine the main causal mechanisms behind the association. As members of this team, this chapter reviews and synthesizes our technical demographic, epidemiological, and health research. This, and other relevant research, suggests that, like in other cases of education and health risk, because of a historical change in the public health and information environment during the pandemic there was a shift in which outcomes of education dominated individual's sexual and disease prevention behavior. The SSA HIV/AIDS case is thoroughly examined, and then used to bridge to a general discussion of the effects of educational development on population health.

For the longest period of its history, the university was the guardian and transmitter – not the producer – of knowledge. This relatively recent change of transmitting canonical knowledge and generating new knowledge is normally associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Other highly influential university models were provided by France and Great Britain. The association of certain types of universities with particular countries is a strong indicator of the intricate link between nation-state and education. Hence, the history of tertiary education and its elite institutions, the research universities, must be considered in relation with a sea change in educational history – the gradual emergence of national education systems. Only under the conditions of the by now standard form of organizing modern societies as nation-states did education become a central institution (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997) collapsing individual perfectibility and national progress. The nationally redefined university was integrated into the education system as its keystone while also being considered the motor of societal development. From a social history perspective, the latter aspect in particular indicates the pragmatic (training professionals, imparting military and technical knowledge, etc.) and symbolic expectations, “myths” of the nation-state that have been so aptly described and analyzed in numerous macro-sociological neo-institutionalist studies (Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992; Meyer et al., 1997; Ramirez & Boli, 1987). In a macro-phenomenological perspective, the term “myth” is used to denote a fundamental change in the self-description of European society which since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no longer views itself as consisting of separate collectivities divided from each other by social origin – as was the case under feudal conditions – with each collectivity providing itself the necessary education for its members or being provided for by others in the case of neediness. Instead, as a result of a number of material and immaterial changes, society now defines the individual as its key unit, with the nation being consequently the aggregate of individuals and not of collectivities and the state redefined as the guardian of the nation. This conception might be taken as a kind of overlapping area which includes different approaches, such as Michel Foucault's concept of the disciplinary society (Foucault, 1977), Balibar and Wallerstein's (1991) deliberations on the relation between race, class, and nation, and Benedict Anderson's (1991) description of nations as imagined communities. All these studies could be taken as sharing the notion of “constructedness” (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1972) of modern society with the neo-institutionalist perspective. The concept of a “world polity” which encompasses the “myths” society is based on, the overall notion of a cognitive culture, which takes Max Weber's concept of rationality as a point of departure, is identified as the basis of isomorphic change in the organizational structure of modern education systems (cf. Baker & Wiseman, 2006). However, the strong emphasis on international, world system embeddedness of nation-states and their education systems is not to be taken as a unidirectional dependence on external forces. While modern nation-states originate from and remain tied to international dynamics and developments, they are conceived as unique entities. For most of their history, modern nation-states have been preoccupied with making themselves distinct from each other. Thus, while international competition has always been present, looking abroad traditionally meant reworking, adapting, and reshaping what was imported, or borrowed (Halpin & Troyna, 1995; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). This is true for education as well as for other areas of society.