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Over the past 20 years, research on the role of mathematical proficiency in academic and economic success has proliferated. Understanding how mathematical development and learning can be fostered in both in- and out-of-school settings is key to ensuring widespread numerical literacy. Much of what is known about how children develop mathematical knowledge and the educational practices that support such development come out of high-income countries. Widening the lens of research to include children and youth across languages, cultures, and contexts is essential to informing practices and policies across the globe. From pre-primary through primary grades, this chapter examines the increasing emphasis on supporting mathematical development in early childhood, efforts to move away from memorization-based instruction toward support of conceptual understanding, out-of-school influences on mathematical learning, and promising instructional practices.

This chapter focuses on a new school-level instrument for international benchmarking and policy learning – the OECD’s PISA-based Test for Schools (“PISA for Schools”) – and how it helps to constitute new global spaces and relations of education policymaking and governance. Unlike main PISA, PISA for Schools assesses school performance in reading, mathematics, and science against the schooling systems measured by the main PISA test. Schools are thus positioned within a globally commensurate space of measurement and comparison, and are encouraged to engage with, and learn from, the policy expertise proffered by “high-performing” international schooling systems and the OECD itself. Drawing suggestively across literature and theorizing around new spatialities associated with globalization, the “becoming topological” of culture and “power-topologies,” and informed by document analysis and interviews with 33 policy actors from across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, the chapter examines how PISA for Schools helps the OECD to directly “reach into” local schooling spaces. This respatialized PISA for Schools, or “PISA to Schools”, provides the OECD with the means to influence how schooling is practised and conceived at the level of local policy implementation, while limiting mediation by national and/or subnational politics. Moreover, the school-to-system performance comparisons enabled by PISA for Schools arguably provide one of the first – if not the only – international data-driven catalysts of school-level reform. This furthers the relevance and diffusion of “lessons” from main PISA and the OECD to schools themselves, and helps extend the epistemic communities through which the OECD practices its global epistemological governance of education.

The issue of corporate governance has been high on the agenda of the business community for several years but is likely to be a defining issue of the late 1990s. The paper examines its history and discusses its relevance for communications professionals.

The demerger of British Gas in 1996 was one of the largest restructurings in UK corporate history. This paper focuses on the internal communications challenges of the demerger, including the objectives, strategies and results. It is written from the perspective of an ‘insider’ because the author was a member of the executive team of British Gas, responsible for the external and internal communication in the run‐up to the demerger.

This paper reports on the first 20 years of the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), comprehensive infrastructure for indexing and discovering language resources.

We begin with the original vision, assess progress relative to the original requirements, and identify ongoing challenges.

Based on the overview of OLAC history and recent developments and on the analysis of the situation in the language archives area as a whole, the authors propose an agenda for a more sustainable future for open language archiving.

This paper examines the progress of OLAC and discusses improvements in such areas as participation, access, and sustainability.

An understanding of the determination of real wages is crucial in analysing the determination of the natural rate of unemployment or NAIRU. Uses cointegration techniques to examine a core theoretical model of the long‐run determinants of real wages involving unit labour costs, unemployment, union power and the replacement ratio. Considers the different measures of union power and the duration of unemployment and alternative specifications involving the “wedge” but a robust cointegrating relationship is not found. These results can be interpreted in several ways: concepts such as union power or the “generosity” of benefits may be measured inadequately; the theoretical understanding of the long‐run determinants of real earnings may remain seriously incomplete; alternatively the short spans of data examined may be insufficient for the application of cointegration techniques, although the sample sizes examined here are fairly typical of most macroeconomic time series.

Using a national data set from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort, we examined factors associated with approximately 700 young African American boys’ pre-academic skills. The factors examined included (a) family characteristics, behaviors, and beliefs; (b) nonparental care literacy activities; and (c) child health, aggression, and approaches to learning (e.g., curiosity, independence, and persistence). High achieving boys are contrasted with other boys, along the following dimensions: familial, early childhood program, child characteristics and practices and their pre-academic skills, and whether the association was moderated by achievement status. Regression analyses indicated that some aspects of family, preschool, and child characteristics were associated with African American boys’ early outcomes, especially parental caretaking (e.g., bathing and brushing teeth) and approaches to learning (e.g., persistence and attention). Recommendations for educational practices and policies were offered.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of successful African Americans. However, many students, especially African American males, continue to encounter numerous academic obstacles. This chapter focuses on the factors (e.g., social, academic, personal, and familial) that African American males often have to navigate throughout their PreK-12 schooling. Hindrances, such as poverty, lack of academic readiness, poor school experiences, teacher quality, and peer influences, often negatively impact the academic progress of these students and their access to higher level or gifted instruction. In this chapter, the authors discuss strategies that best counter these factors and support and supplement gifted black boys’ educational experiences. Additionally, educational practice and policy recommendations are provided.