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The purpose of this paper is to apply analysis of public discourses on Ze Xiao to explore and interpret the power relationships shaping inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban China.

This study first introduces the rise of Ze Xiao as an educational phenomenon in China. It then elucidates power relationships in public school admission by analyzing continuities and changes in stakeholders’ interaction in public school admission. It concludes by discussing educational reform for equal public school admission in urban China. Data were collected from written and spoken texts about public school admission, including newspaper articles from the 1980s to the 2000s, policy documents and interviews with relevant stakeholders.

Findings demonstrate that multi-layered power relationships caused diverse inequalities in admission to public secondary education in urban China. These are represented by political and institutional privileges and an imbalance in education development during the social transition from a profit-driven approach in the 1990s to a balance-centered one after 2000. Arguably, there is a necessity to further promote a systematic reform to terminate the privileges and imbalance for an equal and balanced public secondary education in urban China post-2015.

This study attempts to make a contribution toward reconstructing the meaning of inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban areas by revealing the power relationships among stakeholders constituted through their interactions in public education during the different stages of socio-economic development in urban China.

Advocates of market-based reforms in the public sector argue that competition between providers drives up performance. But in the context of schooling, the concern is that any improvements in efficiency may come at the cost of increased stratification of schools along lines of pupil ability and attainments. In this chapter, we discuss our empirical work on competition and parental choice in English primary schools and present a methodology for identifying competition effects that exploits discontinuities in market access close to education district boundaries.

Satisfactory provision of basic education is a way through which social inclusion and economic growth can take place in post-apartheid South Africa. Although the country embraces the principles and guidelines for EFA declaration, making basic education available to the present school-age children, and to adults who were denied the opportunity during the apartheid era, has remained unrealized. The gap in basic education has persisted despite notable improvements in the educational sector in South Africa. To address this challenge, this chapter seeks to reconceptualize and expand the meaning of “basic education” within the context of South African society. It argues that the meaning and the practice of basic education in South Africa is inseparable from the historic experiences and the socio-economic dynamics that shape the present society. Besides, to realize the goal of improved quality, the role of non-state institutions in basic education provision needs to be redefined.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and quantify the impact of geographically defined school zones on house prices in New Zealand.

This paper develops a series of hedonic pricing models to analyse 10,000 house sales transactions over a 21‐year period within a compact group of inner Auckland suburbs, which represents the epicentre of the school zoning debate in New Zealand. The study diverts from past research, which mainly focuses on school quality measures such as standardised test scores, and instead analyses the comprehensive price impacts of access to popular state schools. Its unique approach employs a geographic information system to divide the study area into effective school zones and then further subdivide into suburbs, thus offering a vital indicator of internal validity.

The study's findings indicate that the influence of school zoning on house prices is not uniform and the variation in price effects is largely a function of the uncertainty of future zone boundary definitions. Although some “in‐zone” suburbs have enjoyed accelerated house price growth following the reintroduction of zoning in 2000, peripheral suburbs’ price premiums have diminished.

In contrast to standard hedonic studies on school quality, this paper offers an innovative approach that integrates geography to solve what is essentially a spatial economic problem.

How can the author, as social studies methods instructors, assist future elementary teachers develop the knowledge and skills to engage young students in critical examinations of race and racism, and feel empowered to take action against racial oppression? The purpose of this paper is to share one of many possible ways of “doing race” in elementary social studies teacher education.

First, the author proposes the topic of school segregation as a relevant and engaging inroad for elementary students to learn about race and racism. Then, the author outlines and problematizes a dominant approach to teaching about school segregation in elementary classrooms and suggests an alternative approach informed by critical race theories. Next, the author provides counterstories to dispel the dominant narrative of school segregation from an Asian critical race theory perspective. This is followed by an explanation of the lesson the author teaches in the author’s elementary social studies methods course that utilizes these perspectives and counterstories.

By using Asian-American counterstories of school segregation, the lesson seeks to assist preservice elementary teachers in disrupting the dominant teaching practices and discourses around school segregation and helps preservice teachers develop the critical understandings and competencies needed to successfully teach about race and racism in elementary classrooms.

The author concludes by discussing the possibilities and implications of the lesson.

This chapter aims to investigate and interpret China’s educational aid by analyzing its history, philosophies, and practices in Africa. The study is based on review and analysis of governmental documents, reports, academic papers, and news by Chinese and foreign scholars on China’s aid, particularly educational aid to Africa. The analysis unveils three transformations of China’s aid “from pro-ideology to de-ideology,” “from single area to multiple areas,” and “from pragmatic economy driven to sustainable and humane economy focused” in Africa. Meanwhile, it indicates a continuity of the philosophy of solidarity, morality, and reciprocity in China’s South-South cooperation with African educational development.

The analysis also shows China’s educational aid does not match well with the framework of the Western donors. China, under the FOCAC framework, is devoted to higher education cooperation, human resources training program, scholarship, and Chinese language education with African partners. With the growth of its economic and political influence, China will play multiple roles as the biggest developing country and as an active promoter and provider for South-South cooperation in the negotiation and construction of the post-2015 agenda. Nevertheless, we assume China will keep a pragmatic higher education cooperation with its developing country partners to inclusively link it with business, technology transfer, and people-to-people exchange.

This study delivers a comprehensive review and analysis of paradigm shift, philosophy, mechanism, and practice of China’s educational aid to Africa to fill up the literature gap in this field. It also timely presents China’s stance toward discussion on the post-2015 agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which an intervention lesson could help with elementary pre-service teachers’ critical racial knowledge around school segregation.

The author, an Elementary Social Studies Methods Instructor, developed and modeled lessons of “doing race” in social studies as one of the ways to assist elementary pre-service teachers with critical racial knowledge and commitment to do race in their future classrooms. This paper focuses on one of the modeled lessons, which centered on the topic of school segregation.

Based on the analysis of class discussion and student work, the author documented the ways in which the modeled lesson engaged pre-service teachers in disrupting the dominant discourses and teaching practices on the topic of school segregation and developing the critical understandings needed to successfully teach about race and racism in elementary classrooms.

The paper details actions meant to demonstrate to elementary pre-service teachers the benefits of an elementary social studies topic viewed and taught through a critical race lens. In doing so, it calls attention to the possibilities and limitations of a single lesson that targets antiracist practices.

Previous empirical studies examine the effect of asymmetries across bidders on auction outcomes. This paper tests for asymmetries in behavior when bidders are confronted with different regulatory environments. Data from federal and state highway resurfacing projects in Colorado are used to determine if bids are more aggressive when contractors switch from federal projects, with Davis-Bacon prevailing wage and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise regulations, to less-regulated state projects. Results from fixed effects estimates of winning bids indicate that the level of aggressive bidding is not altered with a change in regulations, at least not with respect to the policies and types of projects examined here.

For the past three decades, the dominant economic policy environment across the Anglosphere has assumed that industrial performance results from increasing national competitiveness. The US Government and others have extensively used the tools of deregulation that emerged from the influential frameworks of Michael Porter and the Chicago School. That both the contributing analysis and attendant policy environment largely neglected the very source of national disadvantage, mostly Japanese industry in the 1970s and 1980s, remains surprising. What was going on in Japan at the time, and to some extent continues today, remains largely hidden. The aim of this paper is to expose one source of Japan’s influential competitive advantage – the human resource.

This paper, through the translation of a Japanese-language paper by Professor Emeritus Masaki Saruta, introduces the Japanese phenomenon of managed education in Aichi Prefecture, home of the Toyota Motor Corporation, and provides insight into the lifestyles of the Japanese workers who live and work in corporate castle towns that feed Toyota. Inductive content analysis was used to identify four themes that can be identified as the strategies used to produce a homogenous pool of labor that sustains the Toyota Way philosophy and Toyota Production System.

The content analysis identified four major themes: Toyota’s abnormal level of influence over local government, a unique education system of education management, a closed labor market and the homogeneity of labor. It is only now that business leaders in the Anglosphere are able to comprehend the vastness and depth of inculcation and nurturing policies of Toyota and other Japanese industrial giants – something business leaders in the Anglosphere today can only dream. It now becomes evident that Chandler’s visible hand remains alive and well, but critical drivers of its success in Japan and Toyota were largely invisible to the West.

The research required the knowledge of one of Saruta’s works that is only published in Japanese, and therefore, inaccessible to researchers in the Anglosphere. The translation process and development of themes is reported in detail. The findings are then located in the broad context of national competitive advantage.

With the insight presented in this paper, business and government leaders may now be empowered to implement policies and practices to nurture a pool of labor more conducive with the organizational strategic policy. While leaders in the Anglosphere are able to implement policy, there also remains a new threat to economic sovereignty – the nurturing of human resources in the dormitories, refectories and shopping malls of industrial China.

The development of a company-focused workforce to support corporate castle towns, one of the sources of national advantage, has been identified in this paper. The social implications are twofold. First, in Japan, the nature and influence of these towns are accepted and heralded by the community. Second, outside of Japan, and especially across the Anglosphere, these towns are a major source of competitive advantage.

Through the translation of original research published in the Japanese-language medium, this research provides otherwise inaccessible insight into the inner workings and effectively the “black box” of what was Japan Inc. in an era when business people in the West were playing catchup. As the debate on globalization extends to sovereignty across the Anglosphere, it is beholden on the academic community to provide effective solutions for industrial competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to explore ethical challenges and dilemmas that exist within admissions systems at colleges and universities in the USA.

Although the issues considered herein are examined primarily from the perspective of admissions officers, this paper also considers the viewpoint of prospective students (and their parents) who are seeking to gain entrance to specific institutions of higher education. The ethical concerns of admissions officers and prospective students within the admissions process is explored through conceptual analysis of a trilogy of ethical concerns and arguments regarding the higher education admissions process in the USA.

Part I of the trilogy explores the admissions profession as a calling, discusses some of the ethical issues currently involved in the admissions field, and makes the argument that most of these ethical issues are rooted in a breakdown of the admissions system in two areas – access and trust. Part II of the trilogy focuses on the ethical pressures that are encountered by various types of post‐secondary educational institutions as the admissions process unfolds. These pressures are examined in the context of an ethical typology that describes the admissions practices of colleges and universities in terms of the congruency between their espoused and enacted values. The degree of congruency between espoused and enacted values defines whether the admissions process is viewed as immoral, pseudo‐moral, or moral – and each view has important implications for the efficacy and fairness of college and university admissions. Part III of the trilogy examines three categories of ethical dilemmas – recruiting, personal biases in admissions decisions, and conflicts between personal ethical standards and institutional directives – that confront admissions officers on a daily basis. The implications of these dilemmas are considered relative to three general types of schools: ultra selective colleges and universities, non‐selective private colleges and universities, and large state‐funded public colleges and universities.

The admission systems at colleges and universities in the USA provide fertile ground for the development of ethical challenges and dilemmas regarding which prospective students will gain entry into which academic institutions. Recognizing these ethical challenges and dilemmas and effectively dealing with them is a professional imperative for admissions officers and the academic institutions they represent. Conceptualizing the ethical challenges of admissions within the context of access and trust provides an innovative approach guiding admissions professionals toward moral decisions and actions regarding who is admitted to their respective institutions.