This book offers a highly revealing and troubling view of today's high school students and the ways they pursue high grades and success. Denise Pope, veteran teacher and curriculum expert, follows five motivated and successful students through a school year, closely shadowing them and engaging them in lengthy reflections on their school experiences. What emerges is a double-sided picture of school success. On the one hand, these students work hard in school, participate in extracurricular activities, serve their communities, earn awards and honours, and appear to uphold school values. But on the other hand, they feel that in order to get ahead they must compromise their values and manipulate the system by scheming, lying, and cheating. In short, they "do school", that is, they are not really engaged with learning nor can they commit to such values as integrity and community. The words and actions of these five students - two boys and three girls from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds - underscore the frustrations of being caught in a "grade trap" that pins future success to high grades and test scores. Their stories raise critical questions that are too important for parents, educators, and community leaders to ignore. Are schools cultivating an environment that promotes intellectual curiosity, cooperation, and integrity? Or are they fostering anxiety, deception, and hostility? Do today's schools inadvertently impede the very values they claim to embrace? Is the "success" that current assessment practices measure the kind of success we want for our children?

ELT Journal is a quarterly publication for all those involved in the field of teaching English as a second or foreign language.

In Teaching Literature scholars explain how they think about their everyday experience in the classroom, using the tools of their ongoing scholarly projects and engaging with current debates in literary studies. Until recently, teaching has played second fiddle to literary research as a mode of knowledge in academia, leaving new teachers with nowhere to turn for advice about teaching and no forum for discussion of the difficulties and opportunities they face in the classroom.

This book provides an international perspective on education policy, and of the role and function of education in the global economy. The authors present a Foucauldian perspective on the politics of liberal education, within a theoretical framework necessary for the critical analysis of education policy.

The authors set out the analyses necessary for understanding the restructuring in education and social policy that has occurred in many countries affected by the resurgence of neo-liberal political theory. They examine education policy in relation to globalization, citizenship and democracy. The authors argue that globalization is an extension of neoliberalism and is destructive of the nation state, community and democracy. They show the importance of education in building strong democratic nation states and global communities based on cultural identity and inter-cultural awareness.

This book is essential reading for students of education policy studies and social policy analysis.

This hands-on interactive guide to evaluating and revamping education policy is designed to help policymakers in low-income countries identify weaknesses and make the most efficient use of scarce education resources. Education specialists in the developed world will also find the book an invaluable tool for analyzing priorities and arriving at cost-effective solutions given the practical and financial challenges teachers struggle with worldwide.