Promoting high standards in education while striving for equal opportunities under the budget constraints - these are the new global objectives of education systems. This book brings together research-based evidence on the effectiveness of major Australian, Dutch, and UK improvement efforts in education at both primary and secondary level, whilst making comparisons with similar US initiatives. The book addresses several major questions in this new environment. Those questions include: how to combat educational disadvantages, how to integrate pupils with special educational needs in regular education, how to implement educational standards initiatives, how to restructure secondary education, how to implement decentralized policy-making, and how to implement a class size reduction initiative? Finally, the authors suggest directions for future research in order to increase our understanding of what works in education and why.

Inequality is a marked and persistent feature of education systems, both in the developed and the developing worlds. Major gaps in opportunity and in outcomes have become more critical than in the past, thanks to the knowledge economy and globalization. The pursuit of equity as a goal of public policy is examined in this book through a series of national case-studies. The book covers many different global contexts from the wealthiest to some of the poorest nations on earth. It therefore offers a broad range of different theoretical and methodological approaches, and brings together extensive international experience in equity policy.

This book comprises a collection of studies of European and North American educational systems. It assesses the ways in which governance institutions, political ideologies and competing interests influence the content, form, and functioning of education, and how the formation of national identities is affected by globalization and multiculturalism.

This volume will provide educators at all levels with a research and evidence based understanding of the educational opportunities and challenges facing refugees. The chapters focus on strategies and policies for providing education to the world's refugee populations.

International evidence shows marked average performance differences at age 15 between immigrant students and native Dutch students. National evidence reveals that the greatest challenges are for students with non-Western immigrant background. The ...

With 15-30% of our children and youth at risk of failing in school, increasing the co-ordination of education, health and social services is seen as part of the solution. This book shows how it is being done in Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States.

This book breaks open the 'black box' of the workplace, where successful immigrants work together with their Dutch colleagues. In their intercultural team meetings the work itself consists of communication and the question is how that work is done. The teams consist of Dutch, Turkish, Moroccan, and Surinamese educational experts whose job it is to advise schools and teachers on the form and content of language teaching. Their meetings are structured according to institutional patterns, such as 'interactive planning' and 'reporting', and according to intercultural discourse structures. For instance, Dutch team members identify their immigrant colleagues as 'immigrant specialists' and are themselves identified as 'institutional specialists'. Further, the intercultural pattern 'thematizing and unthematizing racism' provides the team members with communicative methods to deal with the societal contradictions that exist between different cultural groups, in the Netherlands as well as elsewhere. These intercultural discourse structures concur with the institutional patterns so that, for instance, they affect the outcomes of planning discussions. Most studies on intercultural communication focus on misunderstandings and miscommunications. This book demonstrates that also communication without miscommunication can be shown to be intercultural.

This book brings together the current thinking and research of two major investigators in the field of educational effectiveness. After defining educational effectiveness, the authors analyse the various theories and strands of research within educational effectiveness, especially with respect to the comprehensive model developed by Creemers. Written by one of the worlds leading experts in the field, this book will both elucidate our current understanding of educational effectiveness and carry the discipline forward by proposing profound changes to accepted views.