Presents the case for educating women better. Here are sound reasons why targeting funds to educate girls and women can yield the best investment returns in the developing world and provide enormous economic benefits. The discussion explains how such funding can reduce environmental pollution, fertility rates, and female mortality and help prevent the spread of AIDS. It describes an entrenched cultural tradition that denies girls an education and keeps them from contributing economically to their families and their countries. A low-cost strategy to educate more women and girls worldwide is presented, along with examples of successful education programs in many developing nations.

In the field of comparative education without a strong theory-driven approach it is hard to go beyond merely listing the similarities and differences that make it possible to create countless rankings, but reveals little about specific and shared developmental processes between education systems. This book introduces a new theoretical framework

Lance D. Fusarelli examines the relationship between the charter school and voucher issues: To what degree does political support for charter schools - from a coalition of teacher associations, school board groups, superintendents, and voucher advocates - slow or even stop the forces for vouchers? Or, do these coalitions, which successfully pushed charter school legislation through the legislature, actually fuel the fires of privatization? Charter schools legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support precisely because the threat of vouchers is so great. And, contrary to the strategy of voucher opponents, the spread of charter school increases, rather than alleviates, the push for vouchers.

This title offers a critical overview on the history of inclusive education policy and practice developments, with suggestions for possible ways forward. "Inclusive Education, Politics and Policymaking" provides a critical and up to date overview on how far we have come in educational policy and practice in regards to inclusive education, and suggests possible ways forward. The author brings together and critically analyses a wide range of theories and research in exploring inclusion in education. To make this text fully engaging for the reader, activities are presented which have been used on Education Studies courses to encourage students to reflect on their own experiences enabling them to position themselves within the theory and research in this field. These activities are transferable to primary, secondary, further and adult education contexts. "Inclusive Education, Politics and Policymaking" serves as an ideal introduction to this contemporary issue and provokes a critical review and engagement with study in this field for students of Education Studies and MA Education courses. This series presents an authoritative, coherent and focused collection of core texts to introduce the contemporary issues that are covered in Education Studies, and related programmes. Each book develops a key theme in contemporary education, such as: multiculturalism; the social construction of childhood; urban education; eLearning and multimedia; and, language and literacy. A key feature of this series is the critical exploration of education in times of rapid change, with links made between such developments in wider social, cultural, political and economic contexts. Further, contextualised extracts from important primary texts, such as Bourdieu, Piaget and Vygotsky, will ensure students' exposure to dominant contemporary theories in the field of education. Grounded in a strong conceptual, theoretical framework and presented in an accessible way with the use of features such as case studies, activities and visual devices to encourage and support student learning and the application of new concepts, this series will serve well as collection of core texts for the Education Studies student and lecturer.

Discusses the uses of international achievement study results as a tool for national progress as well as an obstacle. This title provides recommendations for ways that international achievement data can be used in real-world policymaking situations. It also discusses what the future of international achievement studies holds.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and ultimately accelerate the progress towards SDG 4. However, these rapid technological developments inevitably bring multiple risks and challenges, which have so far outpaced policy debates and regulatory frameworks. This publication offers guidance for policy-makers on how best to leverage the opportunities and address the risks, presented by the growing connection between AI and education. It starts with the essentials of AI: definitions, techniques and technologies. It continues with a detailed analysis of the emerging trends and implications of AI for teaching and learning, including how we can ensure the ethical, inclusive and equitable use of AI in education, how education can prepare humans to live and work with AI, and how AI can be applied to enhance education. It finally introduces the challenges of harnessing AI to achieve SDG 4 and offers concrete actionable recommendations for policy-makers to plan policies and programmes for local contexts. [Publisher summary, ed]

This Open Access book analyses the past, present and future of the technical university as a single faculty independent institution. The point of departure is a view of changing academic realities, through which the identity as a technical university is challenged and reconstituted. More specifically, the book connects the development of technical universities to changes in the structure and dimensioning of national higher education systems, to changes in the disciplinary basis of academic research and to changes in the governance of higher education institutions. Introduced in the age of industrialization, polytechnical schools rose to prominence in many national settings during the second half of the 19th century. Over time, new technologies have been developed and incorporated into the repertoire, and waves of academisation have swept over the former polytechnics, transforming them into technical universities. Their traditions and brands, however, prevail. Several technical universities are included among the most prestigious academic institutions of their nations and the training of engineers and engineering research still enjoys a high level of prestige and national priority, e.g. in the context of innovation and industrial policy. But the world keeps changing, and the higher education sector with it. Will technical universities have an equally attractive position within university systems in the decades to come? .--

This volume informs the growing number of educational policy scholars on the use of critical theoretical frameworks in their analyses. It offers insights on which theories are appropriate within the area of critical educational policy research and how theory and method interact and are applied in critical policy analyses. Highlighting how different critical theoretical frameworks are used in educational policy research to reshape and redefine the way scholars approach the field, the volume offers work by emerging and senior scholars in the field of educational policy who apply critical frameworks to their research. The chapters examine a wide range of current educational policy topics through different critical theoretical lenses, including critical race theory, critical discourse analysis, postmodernism, feminist poststructuralism, critical theories related to LGBTQ issues, and advocacy approaches.

Policy Diffusion Dynamics in America integrates research from agenda setting and epidemiology to model factors that shape the speed and scope of public policy diffusion. Drawing on a data set of more than 130 policy innovations, the research demonstrates that the 'laboratories of democracy' metaphor for incremental policy evaluation and emulation is insufficient to capture the dynamic process of policy diffusion in America. A significant subset of innovations trigger outbreaks - the extremely rapid adoption of innovation across states. The book demonstrates how variation in the characteristics of policies, the political and institutional traits of states, and differences among interest group carriers interact to produce distinct patterns of policy diffusion.