Laura Perry PhD

Education equity is achieved when all students have the ability to fully develop their talents and interests, regardless of where they live, how much money their parents earn, or where they go to school. While no country has reached complete equity, some education systems are closer to meeting the goal than others. Australia’s performance on international tests of student achievement is causing the Australian education system to be seen as high quality but only moderate equity. In this chapter we provide an overview of the ways in which school socioeconomic composition, one of the main drivers of educational inequality, is associated with inequalities in educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes in Australia. We draw on previously published work as well as report the findings of our secondary analyses from the 2009 cycle of the Programme for Student International Assessment (PISA) to show how educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes vary by school socioeconomic context. The findings show that schools in Australia are highly segregated, and that this segregation is accompanied by large inequalities in educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes.

An education system is democratic inasmuch as it advances and embraces key democratic values. In this chapter, I use a conceptual framework that comprises the values of equality, participation, choice and diversity to analyse schooling in eastern and central Europe during the communist and post-communist eras. Claims are often made that schooling in the region was and continues to be undemocratic. While these claims have some merit, comprehensive analysis based on a range of democratic values shows that the education systems of eastern and central Europe had and have many democratic features. Under the communist era, these education systems placed a strong emphasis on equality of opportunity. In the post-communist era, the democratic values of choice and diversity are being further advanced while retaining a commitment to equality in education. The analysis also shows that in some regards, schooling in eastern and central Europe is (and was) more democratic than schooling elsewhere.

This edited volume brings together historians of education and comparative education researchers to study the educational reconstruction projects that Americans have launched in post-conflict settings across the globe. For well over a century Americans have seen the reform of schools as key to creating social stability and conditions of peace. The contributors to this volume examine the ideals embedded in and effectiveness of American education reform projects in the Philippines and Cuba after the Spanish-American War, in Europe after World War I, in Japan and Germany after World War II, in the aftermath of the Cold War, as well as U.S. initiatives currently underway in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Since the end of the Cold War, education theorists and comparativists have expressed renewed interest in the relationship between education and democratisation. Indeed, it has become one of the "hot" topics in the field. This renewed interest came on the heels of a relative decline in the 1970s and 1980s of research on political socialisation and other relevant areas. recently comparativists have asked, "Is it possible to have a genuinely unbiased notion of 'democracy' and of 'education for democracy'?" "What are the criteria for a democratic society and how can they be achieved through education?" In order to answer these and other questions, we need to clarify definitions and measures of democracy, and what we mean by democratic outcomes, processes, and institutions. What exactly do we mean when we talk about democratic schooling or education for democratisation? What assumptions do we make when we talk about the relationship between democracy and education? Does the current discourse about the relationship favour some key concepts of democracy but ignore others? Similarly, does the current discourse favour some educational practices and structures at the expense of others?