Natality: the opportunity to do new things

For Hannah Arendt, education ‘turns children toward the world’, and so ‘it is care for the world, not technical skills or moral development, that is its hallmark’. However, this chapter shows how the trend in this ‘turn to the world’ is usually the first rather than the second case as a form of regulated natality within a segregated education system, where biopolitical distinctiveness means that ‘elite’ children know their entitlements while the majority of children know their place. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity to the reforms of school restructuring in England enables an examination of direct interventions by the state as a form of depoliticisation by personalisation.

Contemporary Chicago Politics

What was once a descriptor—Chicago as the last major American city government governed by a political machine—has become a trope, an all-purpose means of explaining public policy aims, achievements, and failures. The nearer-to-reality narrative that captures the essence of Chicago public policy trends in the last generation is neoliberalism. During the long tenure of Mayor Richard M. Daley Chicago’s demolition of high-rise public housing developments, public school restructuring, and long-term leasing of public assets both tracked broader neoliberal policy trends, and in some cases, represented the leading edge of such innovations. Nevertheless, many journalists and some scholars insist on interpreting Chicago politics and policy through the lens of personal corruption and partisan cronyism presumed to be the fundamental attributes of ward-based Democratic Party politics

Examining US principal perception of multiple leadership styles used to practice shared instructional leadership

Purpose – Decades of research on different leadership styles shows that effective school leadership is the degree of influence or synergy between teachers and principals around the core business of schools, instruction. While various styles, such as transformational, instructional, shared instructional, point to the similar measures of high organizational quality, the inconsistency in how these styles are defined and relate make it unclear how principals systematically improve schools. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This study used the 1999-2000 schools and staffing survey, n=8,524 of US principals, since it includes a nationally representative sample of administrators who responded to a comprehensive set of leadership measures around a time of school restructuring reforms. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to identify different styles, and to measure the extent of their relationship. These factors were used to test a theory about why principals practice each of these styles to a different degree based on levels of shared instructional leadership. Findings – Based on the theoretical framework, principals should have a similar high influence over resources, safety and facilities regardless of degree of shared instructional leadership since these tasks address foundational school needs. However, principal and teacher influence over these resources differed across levels of shared instructional leadership more than principal-directed tasks of facilitating a mission, supervising instruction and building community. Originality/value – Differences in the practice of styles by shared instructional leadership did not fit changing, higher ordered needs as theorized instead seemed to vary by a hierarchy of control, the way in which principals shared influence with teachers.

The curriculum Development for the Profiled High School

Preparation for profiled training should start within the first years of schooling. Even at the elementary school children can be conditionally divided into three types, dependent on the object of their predominant activity: «thinkers», «engineers», «artists». At primary school these three types are further branched out into eight metadisciplinary areas depending on work methods used: individual, family, society, nature, art, science, technology, semiotic systems. At the high school level substantive objective profiles are introduced, further supplemented by subprofiles, which include disciplines of specialization and deepening. To facilitate personal guidance and support for primary and secondary school students, and personalized profiled education at the high school restructuring of educational content is needed.

SCHOOL REFORMING IN MODERN SWITZERLAND

The Swiss education system is hardly represented by Russian comparative education, but some of its elements deserve real attention. Today this country’s school education is being reformed. Education management decentralization makes this process unequal in regions, where local governments determine themselves the need for reforms, their goals, objectives, directions and measures. In such a case the content of re-organizations took the most important place in educational debates. Almost in every region re-organizations contains the questions of educational monitoring system, introduction of educational standards, developing pupils’ language competencies, school restructuring, educational inequality elimination and teachers’ training optimization. The paper also deals with background, conditions and other features of the reform process in the most of regions, with predictions about its success.