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This article investigates the current state of faculty research activity within Tajik higher education institutions (HEIs), where the level of research productivity has substantially decreased in the past three decades. As part of a larger ethnographic study on professional lives of Tajik faculty members, we investigated and found enormous challenges to conducting research and becoming active researchers reported by our respondents. We analyze and discuss how such issues may challenge the development of higher education in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to describe the deleterious impact of higher educational changes affecting female faculty members working in Tajik universities in the post-Soviet era. Over the past two decades, the social and economic position women gained during Soviet times has significantly eroded, bringing enormous challenges to education and higher education access, completion and staffing. The demographic and cultural marginalization of women here has negatively impacted university teaching opportunities and the status of women faculty members. Ethnographic interviews – along with relevant secondary data – reveal that despite various official gender-equity policies announced by the state, female participation issues remain prominent in the university. Our interviewees also report continued difficulty entering higher faculty ranks and leadership positions in university. However, significant numbers of women are still to be found there, and they report a workable compromise between being professional educators and trying to navigate a local culture that is becoming more ‘traditional’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the use of standardized testing, educational assessment and reforms on university examinations.

Abstract: Independent Kyrgyzstan has inherited the Soviet school system, including vospitaniye as an essential part. Soviet social policy was driven by the belief that building communism partly depended upon the creation of the “Soviet man.” Such an individual would demonstrate unwavering commitment to aims of the October Revolution, and desire to undertake the technological and scientific training required to achieve collective purposes. The resulting social cohesion among like-minded individuals would thus reinforce the economic and political aims of the USSR. A primary institutional location for the creation of such individuals was the secondary school, formally organized to achieve two distinct but equally important goals: the transmission of formal knowledge (obrazovaniye) and the process of social upbringing (vospitaniye). This paper first considers the critical nature of vospitaniye as an aim of the USSR, an aim typically underestimated in the current discourse of reforming post-Soviet schools. It then suggests contemporary dilemmas voiced by practicing educators in several Kyrgyz schools who are still charged with social upbringing, but in a climate where the ideals and values upon which vospitaniye was initially created appear no longer viable. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Focuses on the implication of consolidating rural schools in improving cost-effectiveness and accountability in school management in the U.S. Concerns of modern educators to address shortcomings in preparing children for the information age; Distinction between school and schooling; Difficulties in consolidating rural high schools.