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Over the past decades, there has been an intensifying movement to privatize education in Western nations, with equal concern about the quality of education for all. This article adds to a global understanding of school inspections as a governance mechanism to promote educational quality in an entirely open K-12 educational marketplace.

The role of school inspections as a quality assurance device is examined from a market accountability perspective. The Emirate of Dubai is used as an illustrative example of market accountability, where the educational landscape constitutes primarily a private open market.

Dubai proves that market accountability can address the needs of all families, assuring the provision of a sufficient quality standard of education, while allowing for competition to drive improvement. There are two lessons that Dubai offers a global audience that has been debating the merits of privatizing education: a fully free unregulated market does not promote an education system that provides a minimum standard of education for all; and a private education system can address stakeholder concerns and operate successfully in parallel to a public sector.

The idiosyncratic United Arab Emirates (UAE) education sector calls for a balance between flexibility and quality assurance across semi-independent jurisdictions. Hosting a majority of non-Emirati resident families, Dubai has developed a public inspection system for a private education market for quality assurance across 17 curricula offered in 215 private schools with diverse profit models. That most Dubai school-aged children are in private schools demanded accommodating an atypical landscape for K-12 education that affords insights into how a free market can operate. The authors encourage future research that may build a more comprehensive framework for better understanding the public–private education debate.

Educational resources are integral components of resource‐intensive technology‐enhanced and “student‐centered” learning environments. While resources on delivery formats such as CD‐ROMs are carefully selected, edited, reworked and presented for specific educational purposes, a lot of resources on the Web are not. Adopts the term “non‐educationally‐focused (NEF) resource” to refer to such resources. NEF resources may have the potential for educational use, but have not been identified for this purpose. Recognizes this subtle but significant difference between “educational resources” and “educational aspects of resources” among the plethora of information that can be found on the World Wide Web, and promotes the direct learner use and reuse of NEF resources. Urges those concerned with formulating metadata standards to recognize the notion of NEF resources and start the process of extending the standard to enabling the effective use and reuse of the richer NEF resources base on the World Wide Web.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the robustness of the findings on educational advantage among sexual minority men.

Using nationally representative data (AddHealth) and controlling for other predictors of academic attainment, we examine the educational attainment of sexual minority males by using hierarchical regression and logistical regression for two measures of sexual identity.

We find robust differences in educational attainment across analyses and sexual orientation constructs. Our results show sexual minority identity predicts up to a year more of education for male respondents and consistently reporting male homosexuals have an even greater advantage, more than one and a half years, compared to inconsistent responders.

Our results extend previous research on educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adolescents, suggesting there are sustained differences in long-term educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adults and supporting earlier analyses of the AddHealth survey data. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining educational attainment as measured by continuous years and cut-points, using two measures of sexual orientation, providing estimates for all Wave 4 sexual minority identities (i.e., not collapsing any sexual minority category), and controlling for adolescent school geography and type. Moreover, we find early identification of sexual orientation and stability of sexual orientation may be an important source of variation in identifying LGBTQ adolescents who are at greater academic risk or who may benefit from increased social support.

This paper aims to educate the youth about information security. Cyber technologies and services are increasingly becoming integrated into individual’s daily lives. As such, individuals are constantly being exposed to the benefits and risks of these technologies. Cyber security knowledge and skills are becoming fundamental life skills for today’s users. This is particularly true for the current generation of digital natives.

Within the design science paradigm, several case studies are used to evaluate the research artefact.

The authors believe that the presented artefact could effectively convey basic information security concepts to the youth.

This study had a number of limitations. First, all the learner groups who participated in this study were too small to enable analysis of findings for statistical significance. Second, the data compiled on the long-term effectiveness of the game for Group B was incomplete. This limitation was the result of School B’s ethical concerns regarding learners being a vulnerable target audience.

This paper presents and evaluates a brain-compatible, information security educational game that can be used to introduce information security concepts to the youth from a very young age.

This chapter examines the trend in school enrollment and transitions to senior high school and to college in China for selected young cohorts since the 1990s, based on the analyses of the sample data from population censuses in 1990 and 2000 and the mini-census in 2005. We pay particular attention to educational inequality based on gender and the household registration system (hukou) in the context of educational expansion. Results show a substantial increase in educational opportunities over time at all levels. In particular, women have gained relatively more; gender inequality has decreased over time, and the gap in college enrollments was even reversed to favor women in 2005. However, rural–urban inequality was enlarged in the 1990s. The educational expansion has mainly benefited females and urban residents.

In patriarchal settings, cultural barriers continue to influence women’s participation in positions of leadership and political authority. This paper aims to explore these findings in light of the theoretical concepts of “hegemonic masculinity” and “patriarchy,” which explain gender disparities in the occupancy of political power and leadership positions in Qatar.

Data from original face-to-face national surveys conducted among subjects in Qatar were used, including 1,611 completed household interviews.

The findings were consistent with the prevailing patriarchal beliefs present in Qatari society and Arab Gulf States. The analysis showed that there was greater significant support for men holding key leadership and authority positions than women. Individual-level factors were found to have a significant association with attitudes favoring women. Compared to respondents who had never attended school, those who had completed secondary school and those who had partaken in higher education favored having women in leadership roles.

As a means to fix the gender imbalance within the occupancy of positions of political power in Qatar, this study recommends putting substantial efforts into increasing the number of interventions underpinning gender equality through social awareness programs that may improve the public’s perceptions. Furthermore, gender-equitable affirmative actions are needed to promote the inclusion of women in power and increase their presence in leadership roles.

This study is among the very few that have theoretically and empirically addressed the issue of women’s authority and involvement in key leadership roles in the context of Qatar.

In their authoritative literature review, Breen and Jonsson (2005) claim that ‘one of the most significant trends in the study of inequalities in educational attainment in the past decade has been the resurgence of rational-choice models focusing on educational decision making’. The starting point of the present contribution is that these models have largely ignored the explanatory relevance of social interactions. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper introduces a micro-founded formal model of the macro-level structure of educational inequality, which frames educational choices as the result of both subjective ability/benefit evaluations and peer-group pressures. As acknowledged by Durlauf (2002, 2006) and Akerlof (1997), however, while the social psychology and ethnographic literature provides abundant empirical evidence of the explanatory relevance of social interactions, statistical evidence on their causal effect is still flawed by identification and selection bias problems. To assess the relative explanatory contribution of the micro-level and network-based mechanisms hypothesised, the paper opts for agent-based computational simulations. In particular, the technique is used to deduce the macro-level consequences of each mechanism (sequentially introduced) and to test these consequences against French aggregate individual-level survey data. The paper's main result is that ability and subjective perceptions of education benefits, no matter how intensely differentiated across agent groups, are not sufficient on their own to generate the actual stratification of educational choices across educational backgrounds existing in France at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By computational counterfactual manipulations, the paper proves that network-based interdependencies among educational choices are instead necessary, and that they contribute, over and above the differentiation of ability and of benefit perceptions, to the genesis of educational stratification by amplifying the segregation of the educational choices that agents make on the basis of purely private ability/benefit calculations.

Today, the global education market is one of the faster growing sectors, and it has attracted several new actors or what we call educational brokers who are now responsible for shaping national agendas. The newer actors in education are vastly different for the former players in that whereas previous actors engrossed national educational systems through the provision of technical assistance to meet international standards, best practices, and benchmarks, these newer players are for-profit entities that emphasize austerity, leanness, human resource maximization, performance targets, and competition. Therefore, in this new educational landscape, national governments are seen as “clients” who receive “expert” advice from “external consultants” that have an assortment of experiences across different sectors. Education governance is no longer a statist endowed but one that incubates in laborites of best practices resonates with existing case studies and results driven based on Big Date collected. We argue that educational brokers are responsible for the emergence of a hybrid form of education governance that use business and market techniques to reform strategies within the education sector. We conclude by suggesting that collectively educational brokers are using what we call “educational sub-prime mechanisms” – higher interest rates, reduced quality collateral, and less advantageous terms to counterweight higher credit risk – to manage educational portfolios and newer forms of educational risk.

Tertiary education in the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica, has become highly competitive and complex and increasingly influenced by global neoliberal discourses. This free-market driven development is partly evidenced by the proliferation of national, regional, and international providers. Yet, within this seemingly unrelenting international influence, one can also detect more recent approaches by regional governments in concert and individually, through policy and systems of governance to reassert their sovereignty and retain some level of regulation and ownership of tertiary education. This chapter establishes an analytical framework for understanding these tertiary education governance changes by drawing on the principles of critical educational policy analysis. The chapter scrutinizes the multiple sources of power, international, regional, and national, that shape the rapid ongoing tertiary educational changes. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Jamaica’s tertiary education governance can be categorized as a shift from the governance mechanisms of “growth driven” to “regulatory control.” The chapter further posits that future regional shifts in tertiary education governance will be shaped by the continuing postcolonial struggles to adapt to the global order while protecting regional and national interests and aspirations.