By presenting a series of intricate analyses of educational phenomena through the theoretical lenses offered by Immanuel Wallerstein and István Mészáros, the book engages readers and helps them to critically analyze their own participation in the global economy, as citizens, policy-makers, and academics or teachers.

This second handbook offers all new content in which readers will find a thoughtful and measured interrogation of significant contemporary thinking and practice in urban education. Each chapter reflects contemporary cutting-edge issues in urban education as defined by their local context. One important theme that runs throughout this handbook is how urban is defined, and under what conditions the marginalized are served by the schools they attend. Schooling continues to hold a special place both as a means to achieve social mobility and as a mechanism for supporting the economy of nations. This second handbook focuses on factors such as social stratification, segmentation, segregation, racialization, urbanization, class formation and maintenance, and patriarchy. The central concern is to explore how equity plays out for those traditionally marginalized in urban schools in different locations around the globe. Researchers will find an analysis framework that will make the current practice and outcomes of urban education, and their alternatives, more transparent, and in turn this will lead to solutions that can help improve the life-options for students historically underserved by urban schools.

A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. Hanushek and Woessmann contend that the cognitive skills of the population—which they term the “knowledge capital” of a nation—are essential to long-run prosperity. Hanushek and Woessmann subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the “Latin American growth puzzle” and the “East Asian miracle” can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance.

This book offers a practical and approachable overview of central theories in comparative and international education (CIE). The chapters focus in depth on specific theoretical perspectives and seek to elucidate the histories, assumptions, and recent developments of these theories. The chapters also situate the theories within CIE, include specific case studies of theoretical application, and outline suggestions for further reading. Written by leading scholars from around the world, this is must-have reference work for anyone teaching, researching, studying, or working in CIE. The handbook includes chapters on a diverse collection of theories, including but not limited to: Structural-functionalism, Colonialism/Imperialism, Marxism, Human Capital Theory, Dependency/World Systems Theory, Post-Colonialism, Post-Socialism, Post-Foundationalism, Neo-liberalism, Neo-Institutionalism, Neo-Marxism, Policy Borrowing and Lending, Peace Theories, Human Rights, Constructivism, Racism, Gender, Queer Theory, Social Network Theory, Capabilities Theory, and Cultural Political Economy.

"The categories commonly mobilized to think about education have long been associated with the notion of the nation state, and functioned as obstacles, rather than resources, for our understanding of how globalization plays out in this particular field. In the last two decades, both social theory and comparative politics have attempted to overcome these limitations in their own way. Social theory increasingly acknowledged education as a global phenomenon. Theories have been developed to describe a global society evolving across borders. They show how, through processes that remain debated (cultural isomorphism, capitalism, functional differentiation), a number of structural and semantic evolutions have spread across education systems. Part I of this Handbook is dedicated to presenting, discussing, and comparing three such theories of globalization and their implications for our understanding of education and education policy. Comparative politics has for its part concerned itself with developing a more complex, less unified and 'transformationalist' view of the State by acknowledging the fragmentation and distribution of its functions among distinct domains and levels. Part II gravitates around this global constellation, with chapters focusing on global reforms, norms and ideas put forward by supranational organizations, on international accountability processes and on the ways in which nation states or local actors adopt, implement or resist global ideas and reforms. The two Parts reflect these disciplinary approaches to the relation between globalization and education. Together, these two approaches seek to provide a comprehensive overview of how globalization and education interact to result in distinct and varying outcomes across world regions"--

In this open access volume, the editors identify the trajectories and patterns displayed by education systems and investigate the causes of change from a global and historical perspective. The contributors argue that the emergence and development of education systems can be traced back to inherent national factors, as well as to the international diffusion of ideas. The research presented in this volume is a wide-ranging analysis and explanation of the dynamics of emergence, diffusion, and change in relation to state education systems. The chapters offer an empirical investigation into whether the global diffusion of Western-rational educational content and organizational forms occurs as expected by neoinstitutionalist theory, or whether culturally specific developmental paths dominate in different parts of the world. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in various social science disciplines, including social policy, education, sociology, political science, international relations, organizational theory, and economics.

This open access book analyses the global diffusion of social policy as a process driven by multiplex ties between countries in global social networks. The contributions analyze links between countries via global trade, colonial history, similarity in culture, and spatial proximity. Networks are viewed as the structural backbone of the diffusion process, and diffusion is anlaysed via several subfields of social policy, in order to interrogate which network dimensions drive this process. The focus is on a global perspective of social policy diffusion via networks, and it is the first book to explicitly follow this macro-quantitative perspective on diffusion at a global scale whilst also comparing different networks. The collection tests the network structures in terms of their relevance to the diffusion process in different subfields of social policy such as old age and survivor pensions, labor and labor markets, health and long-term care, education and training, and family and gender policy. The book will therefore be invaluable to students and researchers of global social policy, sociology, political science, international relations, organization theory and economics.