Education Policy Reform And School Innovations In The Asia Pacific Region

In the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, various reform initiatives, policies and programmes have been carried out in different countries within the Asia-Pacific region. All these reform efforts aim to restructure different aspects of schooling in order to promote learning and to prepare students for future challenges in globalised economies. These measures to a certain extent challenge traditional practices, established arrangements and deep-seated assumptions related to different aspects of learning. The authors in this book discuss educational reforms in different countries in the Asia-Pacific region in light of student learning, clarify their concepts, evaluate implementation and impact on the learning processes, with a hope that we can learn better from each other and develop a better understanding of "contemporary" learning and teaching processes within the region. The central argument running through different chapters in this book highlights the importance of understanding reforms and learning within their historical, political and sociocultural contexts. Reforming learning involves changes in established cultural practices in our schools, classrooms, and other learning sites, and therefore inevitably arouses tensions and negotiations. The discussion in this book puts to the fore the disputable nature of reforming learning and the significance of contextualising the complex relationship between reforms and learning.

The focus of this book is to examine the growing impact of globalization on education policy and development in the Asia Pacific region. It analyses the reaction of selected societies and the strategies that their governments have adopted in response to the tidal wave of marketization, corporization, commercialization and privatization. Particular attention is paid to educational restructuring in the context of globalization.

Most current educational systems and programs are proving inadequate at meeting the demand of fast changing societies since they have hardly evolved and developed with the times. This book offers insights into the consequences of globalization for the leadership of educational change. Its focus is not on doing things better, but on doing better things; not on doing things right, but on doing the right things to prepare students for a fast changing, interdependent world.

In facing the challenges of rapid globalization, IT intensification, international competition and local demands for developments, educators, scholars and leaders in the Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world are concerned with reforms of teacher education for the future of education in the new millennium. This edited volume aims to provide a global sharing of the major trends and characteristics of the ongoing teacher education reforms in this region and the major challenges and issues raised in policy formulation and reform implementation. With a total of 14 chapters prepared by 18 scholars from nine educational systems – Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and United States – in the Asia-Pacific region, the book highlights the trends and challenges in the reform of teacher education in the region generally and in eight educational systems in particular. Most chapters directly or indirectly address the latest issues of teacher education and development at operational, site, and macro levels from a national or regional perspective. This volume is of interest to teachers, teacher educators, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders in all developed and developing countries.

This book discusses the strategies that the Singapore Education System has embarked to encourage school change and innovations. It documents the change journey of Specialized Schools and Future Schools in Singapore with a view to understand the key tenets that enable school wide change and reform. The intents for change and reform are to anchor the education system to the basic foundations and principles of education and yet enable the system as a whole to be malleable to change and globalization. It shows how Singapore enables diversity within a structured environment through innovations in Specialized and Future Schools, and highlights the systemic rationale behind various efforts in Specialized and Future Schools and the kinds of adaptations schools have made to leverage structures and make adjustments for their contexts.

This ground-breaking book considers current perspective on educational reform in the Asia-Pacific regions with a focus on a new era of special education, particularly as this relates to the educational reform towards inclusive education.

This book assesses the impact of globalization on the education systems of key East Asian countries, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, and the "tiger economies" of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, examining how the increasingly interdependent economic system has driven policy change and education reform. It discusses how policy makers have responded to changes required in educational outcomes in order to equip their societies for new global conditions and explores the impact of new approaches and ideologies related to globalization, such as marketization, privatization, governance changes, managerialism, economic rationalism and neo-liberalism, making comparisons across the region. Based upon in-depth research, fieldwork, literature analysis, policy document analysis and personal reflections of academics serving in the education sector, this volume recounts heated debates about the pros and cons of education restructuring in East Asia. The discussions on national responses and coping strategies in this volume offer highly relevant insights on how globalization has resulted in restructuring and draws lessons from comparative public policy analysis and comparative education studies.