This book, a trenchant analysis of schooling within the capitalist world system, where educational reforms are directed to the satisfaction of the business community, military industrial complex, and corporate sector, is a work combating injustice and authoritarianism prevalent in the Americas.

The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role. This report notes that while the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers. According to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science every three years, U.S. students rank fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other industrialized countries. The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion, says the report. Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education. The report proposes three overarching policy recommendations: implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security; make structural changes to provide students with good choices; and, launch a "national security readiness audit" to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness.

The book concludes with a hopeful view of the prospects for a fourth wave of global democratization.

This book offers important insights into the complex nature of educational accountability and its role in supporting school improvement. By developing two key concepts – educational accountability and American federalism – the book highlights various types of accountability that take place in different institutional settings. By moving beyond the long-standing, test-based, administrative approach to accountability, the author demonstrates how professional, market, and political accountability affect teaching, learning, and educational policymaking. The book examines four accountability types: administrative accountability, professional accountability, market accountability, and political accountability. The volume questions why these accountability types vary in their development and use across the country, and considers how American federalism – national, state, and local – provides different political arenas with variation in ideas, interests, and institutions that prompt different policymaking approaches. The book concludes with a two-tier proposal for internal accountability organized around teacher professionalism and external accountability combining elements of school choice and public deliberation. This volume will be important reading for scholars and researchers in Federalism, Education Policy, and Public Administration. It will also be beneficial reading for policymakers, think tanks, and community organizations.

This handbook focuses on and compares the education systems in the three Americas: North, Central and South America, and includes a chapter on most countries in the region. The chapters follow a common structure and include schematic diagrams of the structure of mainstream education from pre-primary to tertiary level. Each chapter starts with a description of the historical and social foundations of the education system from the post-World War II period up to today, including political, economic and cultural contexts and conditions. By highlighting important dates and structural decisions, the current education system can be understood as resulting from past developments. The first part ends with a description of the transitions to the labour market that are offered, and the way in which these are organized in the education system described. The second part consists of an overview of the institutional and organizational principles as well as the structure of education from pre-primary to tertiary level. It includes a focus on legislative bases and financial provisions for the education system and a description of the structure by using the ISCED-classification. It further includes information of the supply of human resources such as teachers and other educators. The third and final part of the handbook discusses selected educational trends and aspects. In this context, three topics are of particular interest: dealing with inequality, ICT and digitization activities, and STEM-related policies and programmes.

Shortlisted for the UK Literacy Association's Academic Book Award 2021 This volume explores the literacy education master's degree program developed at Universidad de Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, with the aim of addressing the nation's emerging social, economic, technological, and political needs. Developing the program required taking into account the cultural diversity, historical economic disparities, indigenous and colonial cultures, and power inequities of the Mexican nation. These conditions have produced economic structures that maintain the status quo that concentrates wealth and opportunity in the hands of the very few, creating challenges for the education and economic life for the majority of the population. The program advocates providing tools for youth to critique and change their surroundings, while also learning the codes of power that provide them a repertoire of navigational means for producing satisfying lives. Rather than arguing that the program can be replicated or taken to scale in different contexts, the editors focus on how their process of looking inward to consider Mexican cultures enabled them to develop an appropriate educational program to address Mexico's historically low literacy rates. They show that if all teaching and learning is context-dependent, then focusing on the process of program development, rather than on the outcomes that may or may not be easily applied to other settings, is appropriate for global educators seeking to provide literacy teacher education grounded in national concerns and challenges. The volume provides a process model for developing an organic program designed to address needs in a national context, especially one grounded in both colonial and heritage cultures and one in which literacy is understood as a tool for social critique, redress, advancement, and equity.