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Legal and philosophical scholarship on religious education typically focuses on religious schools that challenge core liberal values. Religious schools that offer their students quality secular education, and whose religious character is mild, do not raise these concerns and have therefore evaded scrutiny thus far. This chapter argues that the latter kind of religious schools, which I call “creaming religious schools,” may have a negative effect on educational equality and should therefore be subject to restrictive legal regulation. The negative effect on equality is caused by the fact that when successful, these schools appeal not only to members of the religious community but also to non-member high-achieving students who leave the public schools (a process called creaming) thus weakening them. The chapter argues that the harm caused to public schools cannot be redeemed by alluding to the right to religious education because the religious justification for creaming religious schools is relatively weak. The chapter then examines several potential legal measures for contending with creaming religious schools: the antidiscrimination doctrine, which the chapter rejects, showing that it actually aggravates creaming, locating schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods, restricting tuition, reflective enrollment policy, and finally, the total prohibition of establishing creaming religious schools.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between state education finance distribution models and student achievement. To date, lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of state finance systems have been heard in 45 states; the judicial interpretation of the requirement to provide equality of educational opportunity has led to changes in finance distribution models as well as the implementation of accountability policy.

The study included district level finance and achievement data from five states. Researchers reviewed the relevant judicial interpretation of the finance system, the accountability policy, and the finance distribution system. Next, researchers calculated the equity of both the finance distribution model and measures of student achievement. Finally, an equity ratio was developed and calculated to discern the degree to which state distribution models resulted in equitable measures of student achievement.

Findings reveal that no state has both an equitable system of finance and equitable measures of student achievement. The way that states define proficiency significantly impacts the percentage of students that reach proficiency. This impacts the provision of equality of opportunity.

Traditionally, the measurement of equity has only been applied to finance distribution systems. The authors of this paper have applied these concepts to measures of student achievement and aligned the two concepts with the equity ratio. Since states are charged with providing sufficient resources to enable students to reach proficiency, an understanding of the interaction between resources and achievement is a critical tool in analyzing the provision of equal opportunity.

This study aims to analyze the effects of religion on gender equality at the national level.

The study distinguishes between the concepts of religiosity and religious affiliation and introduces a measure of religious diversity. The study defines religiosity and gender equality as multidimensional concepts and relies on a wide range of secondary data from credible sources such as the World Value Survey, the United Nations, Gender Gap Report and the World Economic Forum to analyze the effect of religious factors on gender equality in more than 70 countries.

The analyses show that after controlling for the effects of socio-economic development, religiosity tends to impede gender equality. It is found that Muslim and Hinduism affiliations are negatively and Protestant affiliation is positively associated with gender equality. Furthermore, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox affiliations and religious diversity do not significantly affect gender equality.

At the theoretical level, this study distinguishes between religious affiliations and religiosity and relies on the modernization theory to offer valuable insights into the relationship between religion and gender equality. This study's findings could serve managers and policymakers in dealing with gender disparities in different spheres of social life at the practical level.

This chapter analyzes the World Bank's Education Strategy 2020 (WBES) to assess its likely impact on inequality. The chapter begins with a review of assessments of the Bank's past education policies. It then compares four different theoretical perspectives on education policy: social class equalization, public goods, human capital, and neoliberalism. Applying quantitative and qualitative content analysis to the WBES, we identify the World Bank's approach as promoting a neo-liberal capitalist development ideology emphasizing private sector schooling and nonformal education along with standardized testing. Our analysis predicts that this strategy will not lead to major increases in educational equality in the developing world, and may even increase inequality.

This article aims to analyze inter‐provincial disparities of rural education and the convergence rate, and to discuss the effects of compulsory education reform after 2001.

The article estimates the rural average education years and education Gini coefficients of China's 31 provinces (municipalities) beside Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan from 2001 to 2008, and applies the method of “economic convergence”.

The results show that after the reform of rural compulsory education, inter‐provincial rural education disparities and educational equality have been significantly improved and trend to convergence; nevertheless the convergence rate on inter‐provincial disparities of education equality declines. The defects of the education input system – “county as principle” – has been a factor that restricts the coordinated development of rural education.

This paper suggests that it is necessary for China's provincial and central government to afford the expense of compulsory education. China's present investment system would also worsen inter‐provincial inequities of education.

Education equality is one of the basic social priorities. In China education equality has been improved; however it could be better if China's provincial and central government afforded the expenses of compulsory education.

This paper applies the method of “economic convergence” to analyze China's rural education disparities among its regions.

This history of the politics of moves towards school‐based management in Queensland education is located within a broader historical and political analysis of such moves across Australia since the Karmel Report. This paper specifically focuses in on developments in Queensland. The Queensland analysis traces the moves from Labor’s Focus on Schools through the Coalition’s Leading Schools and the most recent Labor rearticulation in the document Future Directions for School‐based Management in Queensland State Schools. The analysis demonstrates that the concept of school‐based management has no stipulative meaning, but rather is a contested concept. More generally, the paper provides an account and analysis of new forms of governance in educational systems and the tension between centralising and decentralising tendencies as school‐based management is adopted in order to address a number of competing policy objectives.

This chapter shows, from a comprehensive and dynamic approach, a unitary idea of Europe that shatters the fragmentation and reification of the old continent that is being politically projected. The research, based on a brief overview of the geopolitical and territorial diversity of the Western European countries, recovers the cartographic representation of Europe made by Sebastian Münster in 1544. It aims to represent a renewed area that has strengthened its international presence, based on the legitimization of divergent trajectories explained through interactive logics.

The political agenda for socio-educational issues portrays the contextual diversity that rules the governance of the Western European education systems. At the same time, it shows unification regarding inclusive institutional paradigms where the most significant achievements are accomplished within the European strategic framework. The research allows us to move on from the nationalist–post-nationalist option. Part of the European scene from which present and future lines of joint action are extracted in relation to sustainability, economic digitization and/or reformulation of the social system model.

This paper constitutes a major attempt at examining financial flows within the educational system in Swaziland as well as in computing the households, relative to public contribution to unit costs in education. It found that financial resources to the education system derive from the traditional sources, that is, government, local communities and households, non‐governmental organizations, private enterprises and corporations as well as foreign aid. While the government contributes about 83 per cent of the total fund in the tertiary level, the household and families contribution is higher at the primary, secondary and high school levels. This is an indication of the fact that higher education is heavily subsidized by the government at the expense of basic education, bringing about inequality of educational opportunities within the education system. To redress the imbalance in the funding mechanism, cost‐sharing or cost recovery measures are being proposed at the higher education level.

During the past few decades, South Korea has experienced a remarkable educational expansion at its secondary and tertiary levels as well as at the primary level, resulting in extraordinary variation between the educational attainment of recent and older cohorts. Using 1990 data from the Social Inequality Study in Korea, the study examines trends in the influence of social background on educational attainment across three male cohorts born between 1921 and 1970. Although in general the impacts of social origin have changed little at the secondary levels of education, there is a significant reduction in the effect of father’s occupation on the odds of completing middle school for the youngest cohort. From a multinomial model of transitions to each type of tertiary education, it is found that family background has a stronger effect in the transition from high school to four-year university than to junior college. Interestingly, there has been an increase across cohorts in the influence of father’s education on the likelihood of entering a university, while such a pattern is not observed for the transition to junior college.

The study seeks to examine the relationship between the implementation of the ISO 9000 quality management system and educational outcomes of schools, measured by student achievement on the state‐mandated tests and school attendance rates – graduation rates, in the case of high schools.

The study was conducted using schools in the USA that have implemented ISO 9000. The study employed the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) technique, taking into account the hierarchically nested data structure of this study.

It was found that: first, there is no relationship between ISO 9000 participation and students' learning outcomes on the state‐mandated tests – both for students in general and economically disadvantaged students in particular, across math and reading, and at all school levels; second, standardization of schooling by ISO 9000 fails to decrease the negative influence of school SES on the overall student achievement of a school; and finally, although ISO 9000 participation is not related to the students' graduation rates in high schools, it is positively associated with the students' school attendance rates in elementary and middle schools.

Given the long‐established institutional features of education such as value‐orientation, diversity, and complexity, ISO 9000, focusing on procedural standardization of classroom activities, may not work well as a quick‐fix solution to improve student learning.

The study suggests that, by helping schools become organized and thus function well in the area of essential school operations such as student and teacher attendance, ISO 9000 could positively influence school performance without threatening other important values such as teachers' professional autonomy and creativity in classrooms.