Politics, Policy, and Practice of Teacher Education Reform in India

Educational reform measures adopted in India since early liberalization led to systemic changes in the provisioning and practice of school and teacher education. Despite judicial intervention, the state withdrew from the responsibility of developing institutional capacity to prepare teachers, leading to a de facto public policy that undermines the potential role of teachers and their education in achieving equitable, quality education. The policy narrative constructed around quality and knowledge created the logic of marginalizing the teacher, undermining the teacher’s agency and the need for epistemic engagement. Commitment to the Constitution-led policy frame was gradually subverted by a polity committed to privatizing education and a bureaucracy committed to incrementalism and suboptimal solutions to the several challenges of universalizing quality education. A discourse constructed around teachers, their education, and practice led to narrowing curriculum to a disconnected set of learning outcomes and putting the onus of learning on the child. In the absence of robust institutional monitoring of the Right to Education effort and poor fiscal and teacher provisioning, this act too became a target of neoliberal reform, leading to dilution. The wedge between the constitutional aims of education and market-based reforms has become sharper as the practice of education prioritizes narrow economic self-interest over crucial public and social concerns. This has gradually hollowed out the Constitution-centered national policy perspective on education as critical to the needs of India’s disadvantaged and plural society. A major fallout of this has been the decoupling of concerns for social justice from those for quality education.

The Ways to Come Over the Institutional Traps of Higher Education and Science Spere

The present paper is devoted to the Russian ineffective higher education and science institutions functioning study and analysis. We consider such institutions to be institutional traps, which are identified as sustainable inefficient rules and practices with the negative impact for education and science sphere reforms and transformations. The lack of the methodology base for regular institutional monitoring is one of the reasonable issues to institutional traps study. Such institutional monitoring should consist of qualitative and quantitative studies to find out the higher education and science sphere representatives points of view on the reforms results. To find out the solution and to improve the research methodology we used in-depth interview surveys and focus group discussions with lecturers and scientists of the Southern Federal University. This methodology let us to improve the institutional traps study and to design the way to come over the difficulties and barriers considering the ideas and experience of the sphere representatives. The responders involved in the present research were suggested by the six following institutional traps to discuss: the metric's trap, the trap of raising level of bureaucracy, the trap of shortage of financing, the quality of education decline trap, the trap of staff capacity and the electronization and digitalization trap.

Integration of the WFME Standards and AUN-QA Criteria for Student Assessment in Undergraduate Medical Education

Quality assurance (QA) is a broad-based activity, which encompasses both quality management and quality control, and requires all the policies, standards, systems and processes in place to maintain and improve medical education quality. QA can be managed through an institutional monitoring that should include the evaluation of teaching and learning approaches, and the assessment. Accreditation standards by international agencies such as the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) are to be followed for an external quality assurance. In addition, the ASEAN University Network-Quality Assurance (AUN-QA) is the assessment criteria for promoting QA in higher educational programs in ASEAN countries. Both WFME and AUN-QA require that teaching and learning approaches and assessment methods be aligned to the program learning outcomes. The purpose of this review is to compare the WFME standards and the AUN-QA criteria on teaching and learning approaches and methods of assessment to encourage the integration of these two QA systems for undergraduate medical education.

Multiple Hierarchies

Islamic Studies is slowly moving beyond the long-established divide between neo/orientalist and confessional approaches. A more integrated, reflexive model is in progress at a few Islamic colleges now accredited by universities, but even then, the support flows asymmetrically from the university to the college. In addition, assumptions about the criticality of believers still pervade and divide the field, which is largely configured by gendered, epistemic, and institutional hierarchies. Yet, the growing number of Muslim students and staff, the expansion in private provision aspiring to accreditation, and even problematic political changes such as securitization, are some of the changing conditions allowing for the boundaries of the field to be negotiated and redefined more collaboratively. This is beckoning a promising though cautious move away from monological—and hierarchical—constructions of Islam and Muslims, whether as objects of enquiry or as confessional staff and students subjected to epistemic and institutional monitoring.

Corporate Governance and Capital Structure: Evidence from Sustainable Institutional Ownership

Because corporate sustainability enhances corporate governance principles, firms are increasing their efforts to provide transparency and public disclosure. These efforts inform the public about the relationship between corporate governance and sustainability. Well-informed shareholders know about this relationship, which is becoming more apparent over time. In this study, we empirically examined the possible bilateral relationships between institutional ownership and a firm’s capital structure. Methodologically, we used an instrumental variable approach and the two-step generalized method of moments. The implications of this study are two-fold. First, we found that a firm’s debt level was low if its institutional ownership level was high. Institutional monitoring may substitute for external debt monitoring, leading firms to employ low leverage. Second, we found that the level of institutional ownership was high if a firm’s debt level was high. This association suggests that institutional investors prefer high-leveraged firms because institutional owners decrease their monitoring costs through debt monitoring. In the long run, sustainable institutional ownership materially impacts the capital structures of firms.

Does Sustainable Corporate Governance Enhance Accounting Practice? Evidence from the Korean Market

As corporate sustainability continues to improve and enhance the principles of good corporate governance, firms are exerting increasing efforts in terms of transparency and public disclosure. Transparency efforts provide information to the general public on the relationship between corporate governance and improved sustainability. The better informed shareholders are about the connection between corporate governance and sustainability, the more apparent the relationship will become over time. Prior studies assume that blockholders engage in active institutional monitoring by intervening directly in firms’ operations. In contrast, we argue that passive institutional monitoring is a more feasible governance mechanism in the Korean market owing to the market’s unique features (i.e., chaebols and pressure sensitivity). In particular, focusing on the blockholdings of the Korean National Pension Service (KNPS), we study the impact of passive monitoring on firms’ earnings quality, represented by earnings persistence, value relevance, and timeliness. The empirical evidence shows that KNPS blockholdings have a positive and significant impact on corporate earnings quality, indicating that passive blockholder monitoring is a more efficient channel for improving earnings quality in South Korea. Our results may be generalized to other emerging markets in which a few entities with concentrated economic power engender pressure-sensitive corporate landscapes for sustainability.