This book has a pedagogical goal in mind; it is not a scholarly work so much as an
applied text informed by scholarship and research. The book's goal is to provide
individuals who are teaching courses in comparative and international education,
educational administration, educational policy, and politics of education with a
supplementary text that can be used to help their students develop skills in policy
analysis, evaluation and development. As is explained in the book, the problem
that we face with respect to having students engage in "hands-on" study of
particular cases is that by focusing on real cases, students are faced with either
virtually unlimited data, or insufficient data (or, indeed, paradoxically with both
problems). In addition, students come to such cases with all sorts of preconceptions that can cloud judgment in a
host of ways. By making use of fictitious case studies, though, we can carefully limit the amount of data with
which students need to deal, and we can also minimize the challenges presented by the "baggage" that students
might bring with them about particular real nations.
