The ` problem a of minority education in an international perspective

The chapters in this issue originated in the Comparative and International Education seminar given each year at the Pennsylvania State University and re#ect nearly two years of ongoing work analyzing minority educational policy from a cross-national perspective. There are three goals of this special issue. The "rst is to provide readers with case studies of the impact of national educational policies on minorities in the US and in other nations. The second is to analyze the degree to which cross-national factors appear to drive nations to institute such polices. The third is to derive preliminary hypotheses that can be further elaborated and subjected to empirical analysis. There are a wide variety of factors involved in the education of minority groups around the globe. Some of these factors, when "rst examined, appear to be nation-speci"c. On closer examination, however, there are parallels in other nations. For example, when Akiba's work on Koreans in Japan (Chapter 3) is compared with Menendez, Astiz, and Beltran's investigation of Hispanics in the US (Chapter 7), it is clear that both nations have continued to enact laws or policies that utilize a vague or di!use de"nition of the minority group in question. Both nations appear to be pursuing a policy ofàgglomerationa that makes it di$cult for both groups to achieve parity in terms of educational opportunity. Furthermore, this type of di!use, agglom-erative strategy appears to be available only tòcorea nations that can act relatively independently of pressure from international agencies. The study of several speci"c cases of minority educational policy thus leads to more universal theorizing about what factors a!ect the formation of national educational policies for minority groups. 1. Who is a minority? Dealing with case studies also helps to clarify the basic nature of the phenomena in question. While there are many speci"c studies about minority groups in various countries, there has been little attempt to clearly de"ne what factors determine minority status in modern nations. `What is a minority?a is a deceptively simple question, but one that de"es reacy answers. Take, for example, the issue of numerical size. Simply being a numerical minority does not mean that many of the other factors of minority status apply. Numerically small but highly powerful groups may create educational policies that e!ectively lock 0883-0355/00/$-see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.