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In today's schools the number of students who receive additional resources to access the curriculum is growing rapidly, and the ongoing expansion of special education is among the most significant worldwide educational developments of the past century. Yet even among developed democracies the range of access varies hugely, from one student in twenty to one student in three. In contemporary conflicts about educational standards and accountability, special education plays a key role as it draws the boundaries between exclusion and inclusion. This book unites in-depth comparative and historical studies with analyses of global trends, with a particular focus on special and inclusive education in the United States, England, France, and Germany. The authors examine the causes and consequences of various institutional and organizational developments, illustrate differences in forms of educational governance and social policy priorities, and highlight the evolution of social logics from segregation of students with special educational needs to their inclusion in local schools.

Postsecondary institutions for indigenous peoples emerged in the late 1960s, just as other special purpose colleges based on gender or race began to close. What accounts for the emergence of these distinctive institutions? Though indigenous students are among the least populous, the poorest, and the most educationally disadvantaged in the world, they differ from most other racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic minorities by virtue of their exceptional claims to sovereignty under international and domestic law. This book explores the emergence of postsecondary institutions for indigenous peoples worldwide, with a focus on developments in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Providing the opportunity to examine larger social, political, and legal processes, it traces the incorporation of indigenous peoples into nation-states, the rise of a global indigenous rights movement, and the “massification” of postsecondary education while investigating the variety of ways these culturally relevant colleges differ from each other and from other postsecondary institutions.

This is a study of higher education expansion and its changing quality in the world's four largest developing economies—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—known as the BRIC countries. These four economies are already important players globally, but by mid-century, they are likely to be economic powerhouses. The purpose of this book is to understand the large, rapid transformation of universities in these economies as a way to judge the potential each of these economies has for future development. It also assesses the quality of engineering education in the BRICs and the impact that the huge and increasing numbers of engineering and computer science graduates in India and China may play in altering the global configuration of high tech production in the coming decades. The book is the first to take a comprehensive look at the largest expansion of university enrollment in world history and to assess its implications for national and global development. The approach is also unique, using political theory and the context of the changing global economy to understand educational change comparatively. The book argues that BRIC governments play a key role in shaping the expansion of their higher education systems. It shows that these government strategies have consciously poured increasing public resources into a limited number of elite “world class” universities, while financing “mass” enrollment growth largely through private tuition. The result has been huge increases in engineering graduates, but only a small proportion of high enough quality to compete with those in developed countries.