Education Policy

Lessons from Four Countries
Edited by Marc S. Tucker, Foreword by Robert B. Schwartz and Nancy Hoffman
Vocational Education and Training for a Global Economy investigates the greatly varying ways in which four countries—Singapore, Switzerland, China, and the United States—prepare young people for the twenty-first-century workplace. The book looks first at the highly successful vocational education and training (VET) systems in Singapore and Switzerland, describing them in revealing detail and accounting for the assumptions and social arrangements that account for their unique features. It then turns to the two largest—and arguably the most dynamic—nations in the world, China and the United States, and examines the differing conditions, goals, and arrangements that have affected their respective programs for preparing their citizens for present and future work.
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How Well-Intended Measures Can Harm Our Most Vulnerable Students
Edited by Michael A. Gottfried and Gilberto Q. Conchas
Like medical practitioners, educators share the moral obligation to “first, do no harm.” But as this provocative volume shows, education policies do not always live up to this ideal, especially policies intended to help our most vulnerable students. When School Policies Backfire draws our attention to education policies designed to help disadvantaged students that instead had the perverse effect of harming them by exacerbating the very problems they were intended to solve.
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Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
In Why Knowledge Matters, influential scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr., addresses critical issues in contemporary education reform and shows how cherished truisms about education and child development have led to unintended and negative consequences.
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Rethinking Learning in the High School Years
Robert Halpern
Youth, Education, and the Role of Society examines the “learning landscape” currently available to American adolescents, arguing that we need to expand, enrich, and diversify the learning opportunities available to young people today.
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