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Education is primary a state and local responsibility in the United States. It is states and communities, as well as public and private organizations of all kinds, that establish schools and colleges, develop curricula, and determine requirements for enrollment and graduation. The appropriate roles for state in the education of all children continue to be an issue of urgent concern. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act mandates cooperating and reporting between state and federal educational agencies. State educational agencies, in turn, must ensure that local schools and teachers are meeting the state’s educational standards. The importance of this responsibility creates controversy on how public education should be implemented and what policy directions state and local governments should take. It is apparent that enhancing public education programs to benefit all students requires a process of system change, as opposed to isolated programs and invalidated instructional practices often common with programming in some school districts. This chapter discusses the role of government agencies in enhancing special education and problems associated with it.

I suggest in this section that throughout their formation processes, Argentine and Brazilian educational systems have been subject to similar influences. However, it will also be suggested that these influences have been interpreted differently, resulting in particular patterns in each of these systems, since “Educational ideas do not just migrate; in speaking to different cultural histories and conditions they also change” (Alexander, 2000). Thus, in this section Argentine and Brazilian systems of education will be analyzed as contexts of reception and adaptation of two major international influences: Positivism and The New Education Movement.

Until the middle of the 20th Century, all the governments of the various regions in Nigeria did was to give grants‐in‐aid to the voluntary agencies that operated approved schools while a few “government schools” were established in a few strategic towns. After the Nigeria‐Biafra civil war in 1970, some State governments took over the complete ownership and control of all educational institutions in their areas of jurisdiction. The educational policies and practices of the voluntary agencies were condemned as being foreign‐oriented, irrelevant to Nigeria's needs, and divisive in the sense that denominational schools encouraged religious and tribal bigotry and unhealthy rivalry among the citizens. It was also argued that state take‐over of all schools would enable the government to plan the education system as part of the national integrated plan for social and economic development. The author supports greater control of the education system by the government and indeed a state take‐over of voluntary schools based on mutual agreement. However, voluntary agencies and private individuals should be allowed to own and run their own schools completely at their own expense within the broad framework of government regulations. However, many Nigerians objected to the unilateral seizure and control of church and private schools by the government. People argued that it was illegal to dispossess the voluntary agencies of schools they built mostly with their own resources without first of all working out an agreement with them which should include adequate compensation.

There has been limited research to date that takes account of marginalized migrants’ educational aspirations in the Global South using a human development lens. There is thus a need to consider where aspirations and education fit into processes of development among and for youth, particularly in the South-to-South migration context. This chapter conceptualizes the formation of educational aspirations among marginalized migrant youth. The emphasis is on higher education, with a focus on educational aspirations, because of the importance of higher education for both intrinsic and instrumental development of individuals in equipping them for multiple futures. Using the human development and capability lens for analysis, we argue that to understand educational aspirations we need to take account of material resources as well as the interaction between individual agency and structural conditions. The chapter argues that the formation of higher educational aspirations is complex, as is the environment that shapes them. Such a complexity requires an in-depth and comprehensive analysis to take account of the lived realities of marginalized groups.

Fig. 1 shows a conceptual framework describing several core elements of corruption in higher education, taking into consideration the complex inter-relationships among educational institutions, national and local government agencies, external agencies, and stakeholder communities. It is not meant to be an exhaustive representation but rather to show key general elements in the complex process of corruption in education, more generally, and higher education, in general. It represents a conceptual synthesis based on my own work on sector-wide approaches (SWAPs) to education planning (Weidman, 2001) and educational reform in the formerly Soviet style economic and education system of Mongolia (Weidman & Bat-Erdene, 2002) as well as the typologies of education corruption by Chapman (2002) and Rumyantseva (2005). This framework also reflects themes appearing in many reports and articles that, taken collectively, provide a detailed description of corruption at all levels of the educational systems in the E&E region (USAID, 2005; Anderson & Photos, 2003; Asian Development Bank, 2004; Broers, 2005; Levin & Satarov, 2000; Rostiashvili, 2004; World Bank, 2006a) as well as other parts of the world (Bray, 2003; Heyneman, 2004; Tanaka, 2001; Hallak & Poisson, 2007; Meier, 2004; Meier & Griffin, 2005).

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a group of International Baccalaureate (IB) Physics teachers exercise collective agency by initiating and facilitating their own collaboration using online tools across time zones and school contexts. The paper seeks to inform teacher communities, school leaders, policy and the growing body of literature about teacher agency.

This paper uses qualitative case study approach. Data were gathered from individual interviews, classroom observations and the group’s meeting agendas, notes and reflections.

Central to the group’s work is a norm of teaching “lock-step,” meaning they teach approximately the same lesson at approximately the same time. The norm enabled them to exercise collective agency over the curriculum and professional learning by establishing conditions for sharing knowledge and experiences and fostering accountability while still allowing for some individual adaptation.

An implication for teacher communities is that the norm of lock-step may be of benefit for improving curriculum (or other educational reforms) when the intention of the norm is to advance the collective (vs marching at the same pace). The study underscores the value of school leaders providing opportunities for teacher choice and voice in the design and facilitation of their learning communities.

The case of the IB Physics group contrasts decades of research showing that teachers cling to their autonomy. Group members were willing to give up a good deal of their individual autonomy for the benefits they derived from their collaboration.

An attempt is made to examine and assess the extent to which general politics influence decisions on major educational issues in a country, comparatively small, whose total population is 2.8 million. Education is centrally financed although locally administered, and professional supervision is largely the responsibility of a central agency. Educational decisions of any importance are made centrally yet the intrusion of party politics into the governance of education is seen to be minimal. A further conclusion is that the various groups involved in public education have through consultation and negotiation achieved a workable balance of power. The “politics of education” in New Zealand is to he found in the relationships of these groups and the pressures they are able to exert. This is an area that offers considerable opportunity for research.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest within education policy in collaborative professional enquiry/inquiry methodologies, both as an alternative to top-down implementation of change and for the purpose of fostering educational improvement. However, researchers have been critical of this approach, pointing to various concerns: these include the risk of reducing a developmental methodology to an instrumental means for delivering policy, as well as issues around sustainability of practices. The purpose of this paper is to describe a Scottish university/local authority partnership, which developed an approach entitled Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry, designed to address some of these concerns. The paper also reports on empirical outcomes related to the partnership project.

This interpretivist study generated qualitative data from multiple sources, utilising a range of methods including semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders, evaluation surveys and analysis of artefacts developed during the inquiry phases of the project.

This programme exerted a powerful effect on the teachers who participated. The research suggests that teachers developed better understandings of the curriculum, and of curriculum development processes. There is evidence of innovation in pedagogy, some sustained and radical in nature, and further evidence of changes to the cultures of the participating schools, for example, a shift towards more democratic ways of working.

This paper reports upon an original approach to curriculum development, with considerable potential to transform the ways in which schools approach innovation.

In the field of comparative education there is a vast and growing amount of research on how education policy agendas are formed at the transnational level, and how these may influence policymaking in individual countries. Particularly the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) play an important role in the dissemination of education policies. This article seeked to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how the two organizations have formulated their policy advice concerning quality assurance and evaluation of school education toward the intended beneficiaries of such advice, either in standardized form or taking into account local contexts. The case countries were Brazil, China, and Russia (BCR), which in terms of their political power and economic resources differ from the typical World Bank client countries, but at the same time are not OECD members. Our data consisted of World Bank and OECD publications from the three BCR countries published during two decades from the mid-1990s onward. The document analysis was complemented by some factual information gained through interviews of relevant actors. In the analyzed material prescriptions given in the tone of “international best practice” were predominant. This position saw the quality of education as a concept that has a globally applicable definition. In addition, the advice directed at Russia and China has in an ambivalent manner acknowledged the sociocultural context of the concept of quality in the national pedagogical tradition.