March 14, 2006  British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s proposal last fall to create a new breed of independent, publicly financed schools—an English twist on American charter schools—has made plenty of waves across the Atlantic. But while the initiative has riled many lawmakers in his own Labor Party, it now appears headed for approval by Parliament.

February 7, 2006  The International Education and Resource Network, or iEARN, is a worldwide program that allows teachers and students to work collaboratively on classroom projects and share basic cultural information through the Internet and other technologies.

January 3, 2006  From his cozy home office in Warrenton, Va., Christopher J. Klicka is dispensing advice to two evangelical Christian ministers who also happen to be home-schooling dads from Japan.

November 8, 2005  In California, Darrow Feldstein, a music-loving 15-year-old at Beverly Hills High School, has just returned from school. He watches his computer as his tutor, Bindu Sudheep, almost 9,000 miles away in Kochi, India, scribbles a math problem for him, using whiteboard technology that links up their computers via the Internet so they can see the same screen.

October 4, 2005  Accountability based on state-test results has dominated U.S. policy discussions. But around the globe, educators are beginning to pay more attention to the assessments teachers use in classrooms on a daily basis as a powerful lever for raising student achievement.

August 30, 2005  Through the Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association, or ICPA, thousands of parents in Australia’s tiniest towns and remote areas can bend the ears of national politicians and state education leaders who make the rules for schools in a nation similar in geographic size to the United States but with less than one-tenth the population.

July 26, 2005  The push for secondary schools in Kenya and elsewhere among the poorer countries of the world follows a widespread move toward free basic education for all.

May 24, 2005  Nuzha Preparatory Girls School No. 3 is one of 177 schools in Jordan run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, established by a U.N. resolution in 1949 to care for Palestinian refugees. The schools have educated several generations of Palestinians and are marking their 55th year of operation.

April 19, 2005  British teachers’ unions, striking a chord familiar to Americans, have cast into high profile their opposition to a government plan for replacing failing secondary schools with new-style “academies” that are publicly financed but free from most local government control.

March 15, 2005  In Finland, a long-standing legal tradition known as the “everyman’s right” guarantees the public broad access to the country’s vast, picturesque forests, in most cases regardless of who owns the land. As a result, a prized national asset is shared throughout society, rather than hoarded by a few. For years, a similar principle has applied to education.

February 8, 2005  American policymakers have been urgently seeking solutions to school bullying and violence in recent years, but the issue had been receiving attention in many other countries long before it hit the U.S. spotlight.

January 4, 2005  The Visiting International Faculty Program is likely the sponsor of more international-exchange visas for teachers per year than any other U.S. organization, and it represents a greater than tenfold increase in the number of VIF teachers from five years ago.

November 9, 2004  Nations around the globe, particularly those with fresh memories of civil or regional conflicts or political strife, are debating how best to teach their history in school textbooks.

October 8, 2004  In all those regions ringing the North Pole, the harsh climate, the effects of hundreds of years of life under colonization, and the encroaching influences of Western culture have combined to pose special educational challenges for the indigenous groups that make their homes there.

September 30, 2004   Teachers’ strikes throughout Latin America have left millions of students out of school this year, and in some cases, even sparked violent clashes between militant protesters and police forces.

June 23, 2004   A recent Singaporean film, "I Not Stupid," recounts the travails of three 12-year-olds categorized by their school as not too bright. School officials streamed the boys into courses labeled "em3," the academic basement of the country’s hypercompetitive education culture.

May 12, 2004  As the country prepares for parliamentary elections, likely to occur by October, its three leading political parties are debating just how much of a government subsidy schools ought to receive.

April 7, 2004  Educators and policymakers from the United States and the United Kingdom gathered here recently to tackle common issues in urban education, ranging from how to narrow the achievement gap to how to recruit and retain teachers.

March 3, 2004  Alarmed by declining student achievement compared with other nations, advocates from within and outside the education establishment, as well as the Arab constituency, are calling for sweeping changes to Israel's entire system of schooling.

January 28, 2004  The acceptance of evolution in American schoolhouses has been uneasy. Elsewhere, however, Charles Darwin's famous theory is taught with the same certainty as Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravity.

December 3, 2003  Experts in global education say that plenty of opportunities are available for teachers to expand their knowledge of the world, whether the instructors are beginners or veterans. But, they acknowledge, those opportunities aren't always so easy to find. Includes resources.

September 24, 2003  In a massive effort to expand and improve education for its more than 240 million students, China is encouraging American and other foreign for-profit companies and universities to establish and invest in private schools and colleges there.

July 9, 2003  Student-exchange programs, along with conferences that bring together students from around the world and international teachers' groups that are sharing ideas, are helping to foster a global consciousness in precollegiate education.

June 18, 2003  

June 4, 2003  

Waving the Flag

In schools throughout Japan, patriotism has been making its way back into the daily routine. But not all in the island nation are united in their views on how or even if schools should foster "love of one's country," as required under the revised national course of study.

May 21, 2003   Charity Begins at home. But does it end there, too? That's the question facing U.S. philanthropies that support education, which tend to channel most of their money to American causes.

April 16, 2003   Thousands of new students arrived at the 17,000 public schools across Kenya, as school officials worked frantically to meet a bold promise of this nation's new president: access to free primary education for all.

April 16, 2003  Roberto Miranda, the leader of an independent teachers' group in Cuba, has been sentenced by a Cuban court to 20 years in prison, following a dramatic roundup of political dissidents.

March 12, 2003   The themes discussed at Cuba's eighth International Pedagogy Conference were almost as varied as the 40 countries that sent participants to this popular event.

February 5, 2003   Even though an academic handpicked by Ontario's premier has vindicated school districts' allegations that the provincial government has been shortchanging them, Ontario refuses to free Toronto from its control. Includes the accompanying story, "Foreign Exchange."

December 11, 2002  Become a student of the world, and you'll be a better teacher when you return to America. That's Craig Kissock's pitch to prospective educators at the University of Minnesota-Morris as he shows them the floor-to-ceiling world map that adorns one wall of the school of education.

November 6, 2002   As the "new" South Africa forges ahead with rebuilding and transforming its education system following the end of apartheid in 1994, school fees have emerged as a highly controversial issue—one that resonates in many developing countries around the world.

October 2, 2002   In Egypt, it's known as "Alam SimSim." In China, it's "Zhima Jie," and in South Africa, "Takalani Sesame." No matter what the language, children from sub-Saharan Africa to the low-lying Netherlands know the popular American children's television show "Sesame Street."

August 7, 2002   The pressures of an education-obsessed society have led a growing number of middle and upper-class Japanese parents to enroll their children in private 'cram' schools.

May 29, 2002   The European Union, as well as some international organizations and private financiers, is demanding that Eastern European countries work harder to integrate Gypsies into their schools.