This book provides a complete overview of the development of education in Ireland including the complex issue of how religion can coexist with education and how a national identity can be aided through Irish language teaching. It also offers a comprehensive exploration of the development, issues, challenges and future of education in Ireland within the context of historical studies.
Since the late 1960s, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)â€"the nation's report cardâ€"has been the only continuing measure of student achievement in key subject areas. Increasingly, educators and policymakers have expected NAEP to serve as a lever for education reform and many other purposes beyond its original role. Grading the Nation's Report Card examines ways NAEP can be strengthened to provide more informative portrayals of student achievement and the school and system factors that influence it. The committee offers specific recommendations and strategies for improving NAEP's effectiveness and utility, including: Linking achievement data to other education indicators. Streamlining data collection and other aspects of its design. Including students with disabilities and English-language learners. Revamping the process by which achievement levels are set. The book explores how to improve NAEP framework documentsâ€"which identify knowledge and skills to be assessedâ€"with a clearer eye toward the inferences that will be drawn from the results. What should the nation expect from NAEP? What should NAEP do to meet these expectations? This book provides a blueprint for a new paradigm, important to education policymakers, professors, and students, as well as school administrators and teachers, and education advocates.
This book focuses on how school-level features affect student resistance to education from a comparative angle, taking into account cross-national differences. All over the world, policy makers, school administrators, teachers, and parents are dealing with students who resist education. Resisting school might ultimately lead to unqualified dropout, and it is therefore crucial to understand what triggers resistance in students. The book uses the ISCY data set to study multilevel questions in detail. It does so based on the view that system effects and school effects intertwine: system-level policy measures affect student outcomes in part by shaping school-level features, and school effects may differ according to certain system-level features. We start from an overarching theoretical framework that ties the various city-specific insights together, and contains empirical studies from Barcelona, Bergen, Ghent, Montréal Reykjavik, Sacramento, and Turku. It shows that, in all countries, the act of resisting school is more likely to occur among the socio-economically disadvantaged, and those in the most disadvantaged schools. However, educational system features, including tracking, free school choice, and school autonomy, are important driving factors of the differences between schools. As such, systems have the tools to curb between-school differences in resistance. Previous research turns resistance into a problem of individual students. However, if school or system features engender resistance to school, policy initiatives directed at individual students may solve the problem only partially.
For most of the history of the United States, citizens and elected officials alike considered elementary and secondary education to be the quintessential state and local function. Only in the past four decades, from Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to George W. Bush's ambitious but controversial "No Child Left Behind" initiative, has Washington's influence over America's schools increased significantly. Today, many Americans have become more convinced that the U.S. government and the states should play an increasingly important role in the nation's schools. In School's In, Paul Manna looks over forty years of national education policymaking and asserts that although Washington's influence over American schools has indeed increased, we should neither overestimate the expansion of federal power nor underestimate the resiliency and continuing influence of the states. States are developing comprehensive—often innovative—education policies, and a wide array of educational issues have appeared on the political agenda at the state and national levels. Manna believes that this overlap is no accident. At the core of his argument is the idea of "borrowing strength," a process by which policy entrepreneurs at one level of government attempt to push their agendas by leveraging the capabilities possessed by other governments in the federal system. Our nation's education agenda, he says, has taken shape through the interaction of policy makers at national and state levels who borrow strength from each other to develop and enact educational reforms. Based on analyses of public laws, presidential speeches, congressional testimony, public opinion, political advertising, and personal interviews, School's In draws on concepts of federalism and agenda-setting to offer an original view of the growing federal role in education policy. It provides insights not only about how education agendas have changed and will likely unfold in the future, but also about the very nature of federalism in the United States.
Over the last three decades, a significant amount of research has sought to relate educational institutions, policies, practices and reforms to social structures and agencies. A number of models have been developed that have become the basis for attempting to understand the complex relation between education and society. At the same time, national and international bodies tasked with improving educational performances seem to be writing in a void, in that there is no rigorous theory guiding their work, and their documents exhibit few references to groups, institutions and forces that can impede or promote their programmes and projects. As a result, the recommendations these bodies provide to their clients display little to no comprehension of how and under what conditions the recommendations can be put into effect. The Education System in Mexico directly addresses this problem. By combining abstract insights with the practicalities of educational reforms, policies, practices and their social antecedents, it offers a long overdue reflection of the history, effects and significance of the Mexican educational system, as well as presenting a more cogent understanding of the relationship between educational institutions and social forces in Mexico and around the world.
