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In this article I begin by discussing the persistent problem of relations between educational inequality and the attainment gap in schools. Because benefits accruing from an education are substantial, the 'gap' leads to large disparities in the quality of life many young people can expect to experience in the future. Curriculum knowledge has been a focus for debate in England in relation to educational equality for over 40 years. Given the contestation surrounding views about curriculum knowledge and equality I consider the thinking of two philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, and their work on justice, to trouble the curriculum framework and discourse of knowledge promoted through the policy text of The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper (2010) and later associated policy reforms to the General Certificate of Secondary Education ( GCSE) curriculum in England. The Schools White Paper aims to make the curriculum more challenging to students by introducing tight controls in terms of the assessment framework and curriculum knowledge. I argue that, when considered through Derrida's perspective on language and meaning and Levinas' view on the ethical responsibility for the other, the reforms present obstacles to the search for a just curriculum. I look to the work of Sharon Todd and Paul Standish for a re-imagination of curriculum as or through relations in the light of Derrida's and Levinas' philosophies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing extensively on letters sent to me by him over fifty years, this paper tries to present a vivid picture of Paul Hirst in different aspects of his life. The first section covers the huge amount of work he did at the universities of London and Cambridge—in teaching and writing philosophy of education, high-level administrative university responsibilities, and involvement in national education policy. This is followed by a glimpse into his passion for music, especially opera. Final sections show him as an academic mentor and friend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2007 publication of Miranda Fricker's celebrated book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing gave way to a burgeoning area of study in philosophy of education. The book's arguments create a context for expanding the scope of work on epistemic issues in education by moving beyond direct explorations of the distribution of epistemic goods and the role of power in curriculum development. Since that time, the rich scholarship on epistemic injustice in philosophy of education examines a variety of topics, including the impact of epistemic injustice on the experiences of teachers and learners more broadly (focussing mostly on students who are marginalized along lines of race, gender, class, and ability, amongst others) and the implications of epistemic injustice for educational research, policy, and practice. This special issue extends this line of work by compiling a set of articles that address a broad range of topics, some of which are well established in the literature and some of which open new lines of inquiry in the field. In doing so, the issue aims to establish the intersection of epistemic injustice and education as a distinct area of study that holds great significance and potential. In this paper, A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson introduce the issue by discussing these contributions, explaining why education is central to the study of epistemic injustice (and vice versa), and exploring the complex nature of epistemic injustice and education as revealed in the articles that comprise this collection—namely, education's simultaneous complicity as a perpetrator and promise as a disruptor of epistemic injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I introduce a special case of epistemic injustice that I call 'structural contributory injustice'. This conception aims to capture some dimensions of how policy—separately from individual agential interactions—can generate epistemic injustice at a group level. I first locate the case within Kristie Dotson's original conception of contributory injustice. I then consider one potential case of structural contributory injustice—namely, the policy problem of significant financial risk burden on students considering university in the USA. Finally, I consider potential policy reforms in response to this injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The prevalence of smoking is unequally distributed across certain groups. One significant dimension is education inequality, where higher smoking prevalence is generally observed in lower-educated groups. However, studies investigating educational inequality are mostly associative. Meanwhile, studies carrying out a causal investigation focus typically on developed countries. In this study, we consider a panel of low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) to investigate the causal link between education and smoking behavior. Aims and Methods We use detailed micro-level household surveys for 12 LMICs where the duration of compulsory schooling has been extended. By identifying the individuals subject to higher compulsory schooling and using the exogenous variation in education caused by the increase in the duration of compulsory schooling, we estimate the causal impact of education on tobacco consumption. We rely on regression analysis to estimate the effect. Results Our results reveal that those subject to higher years of compulsory schooling have lower smoking-related outcomes, suggesting that higher education significantly lowers tobacco consumption in LMICs. The effect is primarily observed for women, where, for instance, higher compulsory schooling reduces the probability of smoking by 23% and the number of cigarettes smoked by 27%. Conclusions The study's results establish the causal link between education and smoking behavior in LMICs. This significant impact suggests that education policy is still an important tool to help reduce tobacco consumption, especially in settings where the average level of education is not high initially. Moreover, discouraging men from smoking requires other measures to complement education policy. Implications Education might help reduce tobacco consumption. However, studies—primarily for developed countries—find mixed results. This paper investigates the causal role of education on smoking in LMICs. Education reduces tobacco consumption, especially for women. Thus, education policy can be effective in low-education settings. Nonetheless, education policy should be accompanied by other policies to discourage men from smoking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the publication of Miranda Fricker's seminal book Epistemic Injustice , philosophy of education scholarship has been mostly limited to analyses of culprit-based epistemic injustice in education. This has left structural manifestations relatively underexplored with great detriment to those who are most vulnerable to experience such injustice. This paper aims to address this oversight and open avenues for further research by exploring approaches to theorizing structural epistemic injustice in education and envisioning efficacious remedies. The author identifies three approaches: one that focusses on educational institutions; one that focusses on institutional processes that impact educational outcomes; and one that focusses on epistemological processes that are internal to education. Whilst the approaches differ as to their explanatory power and ease of implementation, it is argued that all three demonstrate that epistemic injustice in education is often the result of structural factors which cannot be attributed to individual epistemic agents. The author concludes by suggesting that educational philosophers must examine each of these approaches in greater depth to make significant progress in disrupting the impact of epistemic injustice in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to this Policy Special Issue begins by situating the themes of mental health and education in the broader context of the public mental health conversation, and the new challenges to individual and collective life brought about by the COVID‐19 pandemic. It then charts some of the ways mental health has developed in educational thinking and educational policy in recent years. Philosophy is then introduced as a form of thinking that encourages a slowing down of—and critical a standing back from—the momentum that gathers around the proliferation of talk about young people's problems in mental health in society, and the interventions designed to tackle these problems in education. What brings the contributions of this Policy Special Issue together is, it is observed, a degree of unease about current approaches to mental health in education. An overview of the contributions is then provided, which introduces the reader to the ways that philosophical thinking is brought to challenge and reconceive current ways of thinking about mental health in education in this Policy Special Issue. The five sections of the Policy Special Issue are also introduced: From clinics to classrooms; Tackling mental health in the curriculum; Sickness in society; Language in crisis; and Curing education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the European sovereign debt crisis, educational policies and sovereign debts.

In this paper we study the effects of educational reforms on school attainment. We construct a dataset of relevant reforms that occurred at the national level over the last century, and match individual information from 24 European countries to the most likely set-up faced when individual educational choices were undertaken. Our identification strategy relies on temporal and geographical variations in the institutional arrangements, controlling for time/country fixed effects, as well as for country specific time trend. By characterizing each group of reforms for their impact on mean years of education, educational inequality and intergenerational persistence, we show an ideal policy menu which has been available to policymakers. We distinguish between groups of policies that are either 'inclusive' or 'selective', depending on their diminishing or augmenting impact on inequality and persistence. Finally, we correlate these reform measures to political coalitions prevailing in parliament, finding support for the idea that left-wing parties support reforms that are inclusive, while right-wing parties prefer selective ones. - Michela Braga, Daniele Checchi and Elena Meschi [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In common with other OECD countries, there is a gender gap in educational achievement in England favouring girls. This carries through to tertiary education. On the other hand, boys are far more likely to engage in STEM in post-16 vocational education and at university. The underachievement of boys overall, but over-representation in STEM, presents significant challenges for policy. This paper documents changes in the gender gap over the last 20 years in England and discusses findings in the light of international evidence. It concludes that education policies, in academic and in vocational spheres, can be designed to reduce gender inequalities that exist in both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will begin by charting some of the conceptions of mental health in young people today, paying particular attention to recent mental health education policies in England. I will focus on the concept of 'resilience' as central to these policies, and how this represents an impoverished understanding of mental health, what it means to 'overcome' mental health issues, and what, in fact, might constitute an 'appropriate' response to the world we (now) live in. In order to explore an alternative conception of mental health in light of this, I turn to an example from existentialist literature—Dostoevsky's Notes from underground. On the surface, this novel appears to be an account of a man suffering from a mental breakdown. Ultimately, however, I argue that texts such as this enable us to explore more fully what it is to experience mental health issues, and that also point us to the fundamental vulnerabilities and uncertainties that are an intimate part of being human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to an article the commented on a paper by the authors that examined how the concept of universalism it applied to the philosophy of education. The authors attempt to clarify certain points of their argument they feel may have been misinterpreted including the assertion that they have fell victim to dichotomous thinking. They discuss the variety of opinions that make up the anti-universalism platform and note that they do agree with some of these critiques. They also note that their paper did not discuss the philosophical foundation of universalism.

In the current climate of high-stakes testing and performance-based accountability measures, there is a pressing need to reconsider the nature of teaching and what capacities one must develop to be a good teacher. Educational policy experts around the world have pointed out that policies focused disproportionately on student test outcomes can promote teaching practices that are reified and mechanical, and which lead to students developing mere memorisation skills, rather than critical thinking and conceptual understanding. Philosophers of dialogue and dialogic teaching offer a different view of teaching, one that counters mechanical, transmissive or 'monologic' teaching. In this paper, I seek to extend the notion of dialogic teaching as a method of supporting social and moral learning processes. Specifically, my focus is on answering the question: What capacities must a teacher have to engage students dialogically? Drawing on Paulo Freire and other contemporary philosophers, I examine dialogic interaction as involving a way of 'being with learners' and put forth three teacher capacities necessary for dialogic teaching: self-critique, narrativity and building community. I then examine further what is concretely entailed in the practice of dialogic teaching using research in educational psychology. I aim to highlight how dialogic teaching, unlike monologic teaching, involves the teacher's active ability to support learners' identification and exploration of their own blind spots-that is, the limits of knowledge and ability-and those of others. Following this, I consider implications of my discussion for international policy on teacher assessment. I close the paper with considerations for future research on teacher capacity and teacher evaluation. This paper contributes to our understanding of teacher capacity and the nature and aims of good teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of the complexities of problem-solving, experts are gaining centrality in policymaking (Weiss, 1979). At the same time, they are increasingly challenged in their legitimacy, which is not only technical but also political. Challenges to the legitimacy of experts suggest that other types of legitimacy are important for policymaking. Issues of legitimacy are particularly important for sound policymaking when the authority of experts and the value of evidence are contested and when the debate over policy solutions is particularly conflictual and ideological. In this paper, I use three exploratory cases of the use of expertise in education policy in Italy to show how policymakers design different advisory committees to enhance different types of legitimacy (epistemic, bureaucratic, and political). The findings suggest that while policymakers design advisory committees primarily to meet their legitimacy needs, the legitimacy of a decision requires different types of sources to generate consent and to allow for the impact of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes changing higher education policies in Poland in the last two decades. It argues that top Polish public universities became divided, with different individual academic and institutional trajectories in the academic fields in which educational expansion occurred (social sciences) and in fields in which it was much less pronounced (natural sciences). Using the concepts drawn from new institutionalism in organizational studies, this paper views the 1990s as the period of the deinstitutionalization of traditional academic rules and norms in public universities, with growing uncertainty about the core of the academic identity. In the expansion era (1990-2005), prestigious public research universities became excessively teaching-oriented. In the period of educational contraction, their currently teaching-oriented segments are expected to become research-intensive. New legislation grounded in an instrumental view of higher education is interpreted as a return to a traditional academic normative consensus, with increased emphasis on, and funding for, the research mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies that shift the costs of higher education from the taxpayer to the university student or graduate are increasingly popular, yet they have not been subjected to a thorough normative analysis. This paper provides a critical survey of the standard arguments that have been used in the public debate on higher education funding. These arguments are found to be wanting. In their place, the paper offers a more systematic approach for dealing with the normative issues raised by the funding of higher education. This approach is drawn from the political theory of John Rawls, whose view seeks to reconcile the values of equality, efficiency, and liberty. I show that, contrary to what we may think at first, an egalitarian approach like Rawls' does not in principle rule out policies that shift the funding burden from taxpayers to students or graduates. Which funding policy that approach selects as most fair will instead depend on the likely impact on the lifetime income prospects of the worst-off group in society, and this is a question which will need to be settled by empirical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to a paper that explored universalism and its application to the philosophy of education. The author discusses how the paper addressed the issue of universal justice and how justice is interpreted in a world society that is experiencing globalization. The author believes the paper helps promote discussion between proponents of universalism and anti-universalism. The author furthers the discussion by examining the concept of universalism in terms other than the oppositional relationships that may exist between two cultures.

During the Anthropocene, the epoch characterized by humans' destructive actions on earth, a few seminal questions may be raised: What have we done? How can we do better? This type of questioning is of course echoed in environmental education, related educational policy and research. There is, however, a difference between general and educational discourses: in the first instance, the collective 'we' refers to mainly adult human beings; in the second, to children. The distinction may seem trivial, but it is in fact quite important: If humans have destroyed the earth and caused children the loss of their futures, then adult humans and children humans cannot be positioned in the same place in terms of humanity and agency. What's more, adults cannot look to children and their agency for hope or for a future. Children's agency thus demands a reorientation and a certain re‐theorization. This paper deliberates on the type of children's agency that is promoted by various environmental discourses—human, posthuman and other—and discusses what kind of agency children can possibly attain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central aim of this paper is to explore a kind of rationality that seeks to do justice to educational practice: to our understanding of its complexities and to its actual conduct. The enquiry begins with a review of the limits of standardising procedures, including their inbuilt technicist bias, which are increasingly dominant in educational policymaking internationally. Secondly, the classical Aristotelian idea of practical rationality is invoked (with the central virtue phronesis) because it offers a genuine moral point of view in conceiving educational activity, even if it is acknowledged that it is insufficient in describing the complexity of educational activity itself. Thirdly, the argument then proceeds by introducing two bi‐dimensional concepts; concepts, it is argued, that can give a fuller account of and a more adequate rationale for educational action. The first bi‐dimensional concept draws on Aristotelian argument to elucidate a notion of educational action (not just moral action) with the couple epimeleia‐phronesis (care‐wisdom). The second bi‐dimensional concept recasts our understanding of temporality in education as an interplay of Kronos and Kairos—of chronological time and kairological time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the achievements of the Labour government's education policy between 1997 and 2001. Tony Blair claimed that his government would make education a priority. The first part of the paper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to the economy at large and within the education budget. The second part of the paper looks at the productivity of schools. How far have the changes that have affected schools in the past 10 years, and in the past 5 years in particular, had an impact on the quality of school achievements? The paper suggests there have been significant improvements, not just on average but especially in the gains made in poor areas and in the least good schools. Finally the paper discusses the funding of higher education, the introduction of income‐related loans to cover maintenance, and up‐front fees. The paper concludes that some serious errors were made in policy design. Even so, the use of the Inland Revenue as the collection agency was a successful innovation and should be built upon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Europe, the need for additional funding coming from either budget cuts and/or increased costs due to increased competition in university quality has reopened the debate on the financing of university systems. An attractive alternative to the current general-tax-financed subsidies is Income Contingent Loans (ICL), a flexible scheme that puts more weight on private resources while enhancing progressivity. One challenge of the viability of ICL systems is the functioning of the labor market for university graduates. This paper offers a general analysis of the economics of ICL, followed by an application to Spain. We set up a loan laboratory in which we can explore the distributional effects of different loan systems to finance tertiary education at current costs as well as to increase university funding to improve its quality. We use simulated lifetime earnings of graduates matching the dynamics of employment and earnings in the Spanish administrative social security data to calculate the burden of introducing ICL for individuals at different points of the earnings distribution and for the government. We find that (1) our proposed structure is highly progressive under all specifications, with the top quarter of the distribution paying close to the full amount of the tuition and the bottom 10% paying almost no tuition and (2) the share of total university education subsidized by the government is between 16 and 56 percentage points less than under the current system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses debate of how research is utilized that questions measuring 'acts of use' of research (patents, spin-offs, or license income). A science system is a progressive business where research builds upon diverse existing research and knowledge. The extent of research utilization is determined by the extent to which prior research can feed into research that ultimately leads to acts of use. We use the term 'knowledge transformers' to refer to research users that transform academic knowledge into the socio-economic domain, and define 'usability' of prior research as the ease with which it may contribute to research that knowledge transformers are able to absorb. We argue that total societal benefit from science is ultimately dependent on the extent to which newly created scientific knowledge is cognate with knowledge transformers' knowledge. More consideration is needed of the processes by which research creates usable knowledge in different kinds of research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses means of generalizing from an experiment based on a non-probability sample to a population of interest and to subpopulations of interest, where information is available about relevant covariates in the whole population. Using stratification based on propensity score matching with an external populationwide data set, an estimator of the population average treatment effect is constructed. An example is presented in which the applicability of a major education intervention in a non-probability sample of schools in Texas, USA, is assessed for the state as a whole and for its constituent counties. The implications of the results are discussed for two important situations: how to use this methodology to establish where future experiments should be conducted to improve this generalization and how to construct a priori a strategy for experimentation which will maximize both the initial inferential power and the final inferential basis for a series of experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyse how critical Indian policy texts engage with and argue for child‐centred approaches to education. Summarising the context in which these texts were written, and drawing on philosophical debates surrounding child‐centred education, I examine what the current emphasis on these ideas implies for classroom practice and the role of teachers. I explain why long‐standing debates on the philosophical underpinnings of child‐centred education should be brought to bear on the manner in which policy texts employ these ideas, even though child‐centred ideas do represent a significant departure from traditional practice. These discussions help make explicit the limitations of the manner in which child‐centred ideas are adopted in the texts, troubling their unproblematic acceptance of the child‐centred vision. The absence of such discussion risks foreclosing substantial discourses on the role of teachers, and in particular, teachers' autonomy and the relationship between knowledge and action in the context of teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, educational scholars have claimed that public schools are loosely coupled organizations, but research does not fully address how schools create the coupling structure. Recent federal policies have centralized the public education system, but state laws, districts, and principals still play a prominent role in shaping the organization of schools. In this paper, I investigate how the multiple tiers of the public education system influence the coupling structures of schools. Utilizing all seven waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), I rely on OLS regression to analyze how couplings emerge within schools. Findings suggest three major influences on coupling within schools. First, federal policies have had a non-linear effect on school-level coupling. Second, the relationship between the district and the school affects school-level coupling. Finally, principals play a key role in shaping the coupling within the school, and coupling is a gendered process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a view of action research (AR) as a valuable way in which teachers can pose fertile questions and engage in inquiry with transformative possibilities. This counters claims of its being at best a sterile method of teacher research and at worst a perilous trap for teachers.Chris Higgins has argued that AR has lost its original intention of empowering teachers and sealing the theory practice divide. He claims that it has degenerated into a method devoid of thought. In its social science versions, it is harmful to the teacher–student relationship and teachers have been mislead into an impoverished idea of professional development. The impossible challenge for action research is to recover its original intention; impossible because the landscape of educational policy militates against it. The authors challenge Higgin's deep pessimism, his versions of AR and his negative account of the intellectual capacity of teachers. We argue that AR does empower teachers, integrates theory and practice and is alive and well, even though conditions in schools are not optimum. This argument is exemplified with numerous illustrations of actual AR projects, which evidence teachers’ participatory and collaborative work, in which they engage in positive change. There is scope for teachers wishing to develop ‘customised’ AR projects of their own in current conditions which have transformative potential in changing the practice of the individual teacher. This in turn supports building and participating in a ‘community of practice’, which strengthens the communal endeavour to contribute to good teaching and good education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a perplexing line from Rousseau's Emile: his suggestion that the 'most important rule' for the educator is 'not to gain time but to lose it'. An analysis of what Rousseau meant by this line, the article argues, shows that Rousseau provides the philosophical groundwork for a radical critique of the contemporary cultural framework that supports homework, standardised testing, and the competitive extracurricular activities that consume children's time. He offers important insights to contemporary parents and educators wishing to reimagine an educational system that is currently fuelled more by familial and international amour propre than by children's interests and needs. Not the least of these is his recognition that to reimagine children's education would require a new configuration of the very terms of modern life. Problematically, however, Rousseau's alternative to mechanised clock-time depends on the labour of Sophie, whose time is also reconfigured. For the next generation of children to be educated according to natural time, Sophie's labour needs to be off the clock too, which is just as much a linchpin of her removal from the public sphere of citizenship and the paid workforce as it is of Emile's education for public life, or so the final section of this paper argues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education has been extremely affected by the coronavirus disease crisis, with almost all countries temporarily closing their schools in 2020. After the first stage of the pandemic, in which national governments focused on guaranteeing the academic year's continuity, key international organizations emphasized the need to adopt structural policy reforms to face the challenges posed by the crisis. Based on international and European countries' policy documents, this paper analyzes long-term responses articulated in the education sector. The analysis has allowed us to identify three preponderant areas of response: the digitalization of the educational system, educational inequalities, and teachers' development. The agendas and policy instruments that international organizations have so far pushed for in relation to each of these areas do not differ substantially from the agendas and instruments they promoted in the pre-pandemic era. It is still early to assess the deepness of the transformations in course, but in most cases, prevailing responses represent the intensification of change processes initiated before the pandemic. Nonetheless, the type and intensity of country responses vary among the European Union member states. Although the pandemic represents a common thread, countries have experienced the crisis differently according to the characteristics of their educational systems and the main problems the crisis has revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The failure of the UK to develop a coherent, universal, public system of childcare in the post-war period is well known. More recently, there has been a strong debate as to whether the New Labour Governments' explicit childcare policies, first set out in 1998, represent a substantial change or whether policy continuities are more sig-nificant. This paper uses ideas about incremental policy change, together with a close investigation of archival as well as other documentary materials, to investigate the nature of continuity and change over the period 1960-2000. The findings are rather different for early years education and for early years care. While there was support in principle for the former across the political divide, this did not translate into policy action. Early years care, on the other hand, was actively opposed (other than for children "at risk") largely because of ideas about the importance of mater-nal care in the 1960s and 1970s, and because of strong political opposition to the idea of childcare as a matter for the state in the 1980s and most of the 1990s. As a result, the mixed economy of childcare was effectively strengthened over the whole period. Nor was this changed by New Labour's intervention in childcare. However, the increasing complexity of the mixed economy of providers resulted in a more united campaign for a national strategy. New Labour's willingness to take responsi-bility for developing childcare policy and to spend more public money on it was the most important change in the late 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the link between public education expenditure and human capital inequality. I build a model of human capital formation where government intervention in education is justified by the existence of credit constraints. The framework provides conditions on the level of economic development and income inequality under which the educational policies are elitist, that is, they increase the spread between the educational achievement of bright and less bright individuals. With the use of the measures of educational inequality constructed for both developed and developing countries by Castelló and Doménech, I also present descriptive evidence that provides some support to the model's predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his writings on school choice and educational justice, Harry Brighouse presents normative evaluations of various choice systems. This paper responds to Brighouse's claim that it is inadequate to criticise these evaluations with reference to empirical data concerning the effects of school choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ricoeur's theories of justice are used here to examine the injustice of the utilitarian drive to widen participation in higher education in the UK and, in particular, the attribution of low aspirations and achievements to those young people who do not participate in higher education. Government policy is considered through Ricoeur's theory of the just state; and his ‘new commandment’ is used to consider the disproportionate sacrifice required of these young people if they are to enter higher education. Despite its specific focus, the paper's arguments are relevant to all policies that conflate social inclusion and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the education policy chosen by a utilitarian government. In the model, households differ in their income and in their children's ability; income is observed by the government, but ability is private information. Households can use private education, but cannot borrow to finance it. The government can finance education with income tax, but at the cost of blunting the individuals' incentive to exert labour market effort. The optimal education policy we derive is elitist: it increases the spread between the educational achievement of the bright and the less bright individuals, compared to private provision. It is also such that the education received by less bright individuals depends positively on their parental income. Finally, the optimal education policy is input regressive, in the sense of Arrow (1971, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 38, 175-208): households with higher income and brighter children contribute less in tuition fees towards the cost of the education system than households with lower income and less bright children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how far the New Labour educational policy represents a clear shift in focus from the policies of the Conservative administrations of the 1980s and 1990s. As in other areas of social policy, the paper concludes that current government policy owes as much—if not more—to ‘New Right’ ideology than to that of the ‘Old Left’. With a new emphasis on social inclusion, the paper considers the contribution of, and implications for, contemporary developments in education policy and practice for child and family social work in general, and education social work in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a growth model characterized by ability-biased technological transition in which the evolution of technology, education attainment, and wage inequality is consistent with the observed pattern in the United States and other advanced countries over the past several decades. It argues that an increase in the rate of technological progress raises the return to ability and simultaneously generates an increase in wage inequality between and within groups of skilled and unskilled workers, an increase in average wages of skilled workers, a temporary decline in average wages of unskilled workers, an increase in education, and a productivity transitory slowdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1994, the South Korean government has implemented a series of innovations to change English language education from teaching about English to developing students’ communicative competence in English. This paper discusses the impact of a teacher certification scheme, one such innovation. The scheme is examined from three perspectives: its design, implementation, and perceived future impact. The discussion draws on documents from the certification scheme, lesson plans, video-recordings, and assessment results from assessed lessons for four candidates and interviews with these teachers. Analysis of this data shows that the scheme has the potential to make future classroom practice more communicative. However, there are a number of factors which seriously inhibit the impact of this scheme and which have implications for future innovations of this type. These include ineffective communication with teachers about the innovation, teachers’ perceptions of the relevance of the promoted practice, and the degree of compatibility between the innovation and its wider educational context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Responds to comments by Linda Chisholm and Ben Fine on the author's article `The Political Economy of Education in South Africa' in the `African Affairs' journal, volume 92. Issue on adult literacy rate; Apartheid education; Human capital theory.

. The paper makes use of newly linked administrative education data from England to understand better the determinants of participation in higher education (HE) among individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds. The data are unique in being able to follow the population of two cohorts of pupils in England-those who might have entered HE between 2004-2005 and 2006-2007-from age 11 to age 20 years. The findings suggest that, although large differences in HE participation rates and participation rates at high status universities by socio-economic background remain, these differences are substantially reduced once prior achievement is included. Moreover, these findings hold for both state and private school pupils. This result suggests that poor achievement in secondary schools is more important in explaining lower HE participation rates among pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds than barriers arising at the point of entry to HE. These findings are consistent with the need for earlier policy intervention to raise HE participation rates among pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors carefully study the problem of liberty as it applies to school choice, and whether there ought to be restricted liberty in the case of homeschooling. They examine three prominent concerns that might be brought against homeschooling, viz., that it aggravates social inequality, worsens societal conflict and works against the best interests of children. To examine the tensions that occur between parental liberty, children's interests, and state oversight, the authors consider the case of homeschooling in the Dutch context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of 'gap years' between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that postponement of higher education is associated with a persistent and non-trivial earnings penalty. The main source of the persistent penalty appears to be the loss of work experience after studies. Two years postponement reduces the present value of lifetime earnings by nearly one half of one year's peak earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While several aspects of the Bologna process deserve wide public support, the reduction of the length of the first cycle of studies to three years in several continental European countries, where it used to last for four or five years, is less consensual. This paper checks the extent of public confidence in the restructuring of higher education currently underway by looking at its impact on the demand for academic programs in Portugal. We concentrate on students revealed first preference when applying to higher education. Results indicate that the programs that restructured to follow the Bologna principles were subject to higher demand than comparable programs that did not restructure; that effect, however, varies across fields of study and with program size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bruce Ackerman speaks with two voices. While he is one of the most prominent students of comparative constitutionalism in the U.S. legal academy, Ackerman is better known for his imaginative theory of American constitutional development. In the latter voice, Ackerman observes that, notwithstanding a remarkable continuity of governance, U.S. constitutional history falls into three distinct regimes. He argues that the transitions between these different constitutional regimes, inasmuch as they have failed to comply with the Constitution's written rules for its own amendment, have taken place through a process of “higher lawmaking.” There is an underlying tension between this voice of Ackerman's and the other one, which expounds on the relevance of comparative analysis for constitutional scholarship. While Ackerman the comparativist lambastes U.S. constitutional scholars for their parochialism, in We the People he calls on American constitutional scholars to ground theories of the Constitution in indigenous political practice. This paper attempts to reconcile the two strands of Ackerman's work, focusing on the “constitutional moment”—Ackerman's central contribution to the study of American constitutional change—and applying it to other countries, specifically, Canada. The comparative constitutional research questions are whether other systems experience constitutional moments, and what we can learn about these moments by studying them inside and outside the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Creating education systems that promote democratic sustainability has been the concern of political thinkers as diverse as J. S. Mill, Dewey, Benjamin Barber and Derek Bok. The classic dichotomisation of democratic theory between deliberative democrats and Schumpeterian democrats suggests that education in the service of democracy can be constructive—that is, provide a student with the skills necessary to elect her leaders without changing her nature—or reconstructive—that is, fundamentally and radically reshape the student to produce a citizen whose goals are transformed to be congruent with society. Michael Oakeshott, who has written extensively both on political regimes and on the purpose of liberal education, offers a third way to assess the connection between government and education. Despite his own dismissal of civic or political education as fundamentally vocational and thus beyond the boundaries of the liberal arts, this paper provides a potentially surprising Oakeshottian defence of political education within the liberal arts with reference to the importance he places on experience as a pedagogic tool. Thus, Oakeshott's educational philosophy has a certain resonance with the recent calls to locate the relevance of liberal arts within the burgeoning development of experiential civic engagement programmes in American universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not only the teachers but also the administrative boards of many educational institutions are keen on the idea of adopting technology for teaching purposes. However, the process of implementing new technologies and managing radical changes is far from being a straightforward operation. The successful implementation of new technologies requires considerable effort especially by the administrative people involved. This paper presents a case study of the implementation of an EFL innovation in the form of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) in a Turkish State University's EFL Preparatory School. It is argued that teachers should be engaged participants in the change process and that this increases the chance of successful implementation of the innovation concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper enquires into eponymy as an ex post approach for research evaluation giving modalities of presentation, a developmental procedure and critique for this complex phenomenon. Spanish cases of eponymy from the educational field are reviewed. They were obtained from a name index from educational treaties, a local data base and informal interviews with experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vision of a European Research Area (ERA) has encouraged proponents of basic research to propose the setting up of a European Research Council (ERC) as a correction to the national limitations of existing funding agencies and the applied nature of the European Union (EU) framework programmes. This paper examines the recent rise of the idea of an ERC, including the historical-institutional background, the positions of the most important players and the factors working for and against it becoming a reality. A distinction is drawn between radical and incremental variants of the idea, implying either a large, independent funding agency, or a lighter, co-ordinating 'agency of agencies'. Even if the radical idea of an ERC has been revitalised in the context of ERA, it still faces a difficult environment dominated by basic research organisations attached to the national level and EU institutions and interest groups wedded to applied research, as well as a divergence at European level between focused and general research organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to improve the quality of schools, governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them. By concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools, the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement. This paper provides a review of the US and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies. It then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources. Finally, alternative performance incentive policies are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing briefly on the quite different discourses of schooling-as-performance and education-as-exploration, the paper opens by exploring some of the consequences of the distinction between schooling and education for any system of school inspection. The second section of the paper examines the conceptual and practical inadequacy of ‘accountability’ as an agent of reciprocal public engagement in a participatory democracy. In its stead a more robust, more open notion of ‘reciprocal responsibility’ is offered as a more fitting means of professional and communal renewal. Section III focuses on the relationship between means and ends that is at once central to democracy and so conspicuously absent from current inspection arrangements. The short conclusion suggests we need a radical break from OFSTED if we wish to approximate more closely to our democratic aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the developing commitment in UK educational policy-making to 'evidence-based practice', and its implications for applied linguistics research. Given the sceptical view which has predominated in UK applied linguistics towards 'technical' solutions to educational problems (Rampton 1995), this development poses a dilemma for applied linguists wishful to engage actively with policy for language education. The paper examines the particular history of grammar pedagogy in UK foreign language education, documenting its decline and recent revival. The international literature on form-focused instruction is then examined, to determine how far an evidence base exists to underpin any particular recommendations for grammar pedagogy. The paper concludes by posing some alternative forms for such an evidence base, and argues that the future development of pedagogically oriented applied linguistics is bound up with the choices made. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Canadian social work educators, in recognizing the importance of preparing students for anti-oppressive practice, can look to developments in the United Kingdom for direction and guidance. Recent changes to education policy statements in Canada have included the requirement that social work students graduate with the knowledge. values and skills to be ethnically sensitive practitioners. The Canadian equivalent to practice teaching, the field practicum, is an ideal venue to learn about multi-cultural differences, oppression, and how to combat institutional and individual racism, sexism and ethnocentrism. However. such learning must be explicitly and purposely developed. Thus, guidelines have been suggested to promote the establishment of an ethnically sensitive, anti-discriminatory practice teaching process. This paper discusses how concepts and practices derived in Britain can be applied in a Canadian context to help course instructors, tutors, practice teachers and students build effective learning experiences for the multi-cultural realities and struggles of today. These guidelines can be used by both Canadian and British social work courses and include questions to be raised at key points throughout the practice teaching process to ensure the focus and attention to ethnically sensitive, anti-discriminatory practice is maintained. The guidelines were derived from a synthesis of British concepts and practices combined with a review of selected North American and British literature and the experiences of two practice teaching projects in one social work course in Canada. The projects involved practice teaching placements with a community development project that had a multi-cultural and multi-racial focus and the experience of a native studies concentration with a practice teaching component. From a Canadian perspective this combination facilitates a step forward and provides a framework which has a timely practical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]