This is a core text for graduate-level Comparative Education courses. With its cross-cultural, isues-oriented approach, Comparative Education introduces K-12 educational systems worldwide. Readers are invited to consider current educational issues both at home and abroad, while developing global perspectives and skills of comparative inquiry to use their own reflective classroom teaching. Chapters on theory in compartive education, frameworks for analyzing educational issues, and globalization's implications for education explore several key issues in depth: purposes of schooling, educational access and opportunity, education accountability and authority, and teacher professionalism. This book takes an issues-based approach rather than a country-based approach. A major purpose of this book is to widen the field of comparative education's influence by articulating the relevance of comparative education to include a larger, practitioner-oriented audience.