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Education policy reforms: problems and prospects

This open issue of Compare reflects the comparative dimension of the journal including country studies of Egypt, Ghana, Japan, Norway, Spain, and the UK. Collectively the articles range from a focus on teachers to examining a neglected area of scholarship, namely vocational education and training, and aid to education from the perspective of the recipient country. Two of the articles tackle the issue of teachers and their impact on shaping the experiences of pupils. The first by Gozik, Teaching national and regional cultures: the role of teacher identities in Martinique, examines how the multiple identities of teachers influence the ways they mediate the curriculum in classrooms in Martinique. Focusing on history and geography teachers at the secondary school level, Gozick uses an ethnographic approach to examine curriculum implementation illustrating the various ways classroom mediation occurs, including through teachers’ rearranging the sequence of lessons. The research also demonstrates how teachers’ age, gender, and family origin influence the way in which they engage with a centralised curriculum. The article is a telling reminder of the global, national, and school dialectic in curriculum mediation as expressed through teacher agency. The second article by Smith and Gorard, Teachers are kind to those who have good marks examines a study of Japanese young people’s views of fairness and equity in school, reports on a study of fairness and equity as understood by Japanese and English students. The notion of equity is operationalized as including the prevalence, the causes, and the effects of injustice as well taking into account the impact of external factors on pupils’ sense of justice. This study is based on the results of a questionnaire administered to 1191 students in Japan and 2 836 English pupils. The article notes that there is no significant difference between pupils in Japan and England regarding their sense of justice and fairness. Focusing on the perspectives of pupils in Japan, the article notes that students generally regard the school as being fair. The findings challenge the view of Japanese schooling as in ‘crisis’ and having a narrow examinations focus. However, the article notes that some pupils perceive teachers as favouring some students and disrespecting learners. The article concludes that such situations of unfairness require changes to teacher preparation such that teachers are able to create more equitable classroom environments. The article by Sobhy, The de-facto privatization of secondary education in Egypt: a study of private tutoring in technical and general schools, depicts Compare Vol. 42, No. 1, January 2012, 1–4