Reforming New Zealand Secondary Education

This timely book argues that the New Zealand educational reforms were the product of longstanding unresolved educational issues that came to a head during the profound economic and cultural crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s.

This book documents and critiques the historical origins and historiography of schooling and teacher preparation in New Zealand. The country has a unique educational history, as the overview of the history and development of schools for the nation's children, both Pakeha (European) and Maori, will highlight.

New Zealand has been a veritable “laboratory” for a range of social experiments in the last twenty years, including an arranged marriage with neo-liberal economic policies during the late 80s and 90s. These experiments extended to education, where students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers have experienced wide-ranging “reforms” in administration, curriculum and qualifications. The most contentious of these have been a series of untrialled and radical qualifications reforms. This book offers a critical examination of these reforms from the perspective of a group of educators who resisted them by doing the unthinkable: devising their own national qualification and making it work.

Federal and state funding agencies have invested billions of dollars into secondary STEM (Science, Technology, Education, Mathematics) educational reform over the past decade. This volume addresses the interplay of external and internal variables associated with school reform and how this dynamic has impacted many efforts.

This book provides comparative analysis of policy reforms, and reviews individual country education policy approaches in a succinct format.

New Labour and Secondary Education, 1994-2010 assesses New Labour's policy towards secondary education in Britain. It shows that, in many respects, New Labour education policy was a continuation of the policies pursued by the education ministers of Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

This book asserts that efforts to reform schools, particularly urban schools, are events that engender a host of issues and conflicts that have been interpreted through the conceptual lens of community.

Specially commissioned to mark the 40th Anniversary of History of Education, and containing articles from leading international scholars, this is a unique and important volume. Over the past forty years, scholars working in the history of education have engaged with histories of religion, gender, science and culture, and have developed comparative research on areas such as education, race and class. This volume demonstrates the richness of such work, bringing together some of the leading international scholars writing in the field of history of education today, and providing readers with original and theoretically informed research. Each author draws on the wealth of material that has appeared in the leading SSCI-indexed journal History of Education, over the past forty years, providing readers with not only incisive studies of major themes, but delivering invaluable research bibliographies. A ‘must have’ for university libraries and a ‘must own’ for historians. This book was originally published as a special issue of History of Education.

This handbook offers a global view of the historical development of educational institutions, systems of schooling, ideas about education, and educational experiences. Its 36 chapters consider changing scholarship in the field, examine nationally-oriented works by comparing themes and approaches, lend international perspective on a range of issues in education, and provide suggestions for further research and analysis. Like many other subfields of historical analysis, the history of education has been deeply affected by global processes of social and political change, especially since the 1960s. The handbook weighs the influence of various interpretive perspectives, including revisionist viewpoints, taking particular note of changes in the past half century. Contributors consider how schooling and other educational experiences have been shaped by the larger social and political context, and how these influences have affected the experiences of students, their families and the educators who have worked with them. The Handbook provides insight and perspective on a wide range of topics, including pre-modern education, colonialism and anti-colonial struggles, indigenous education, minority issues in education, comparative, international, and transnational education, childhood education, non-formal and informal education, and a range of other issues. Each contribution includes endnotes and a bibliography for readers interested in further study.

The progressive raising of the school-leaving age has had momentous repercussions for our understanding of childhood and youth, for secondary education, and for social and educational inequality. This book assesses secondary education and the raising of the school-leaving age in the UK and places issues and debates in an international context.