Hardbound. Where is the comparative and international study of education heading in the 21st Century? What are the current theoretical issues, problems, and practices that need to be discussed, reviewed, and debated? How have specific sub-fields fared over the past decade? Our discipline appears poised to take a leadership role in policy debates and decisions, as well as comparative scholarship throughout the world, but first we need to examine where we need to go.To foster this conversation we have been asked to revive the annual review-of-the-field book series, International Perspectives on Education and Society, for Elsevier Science Ltd. The intent is to have a combination of state-of-the-field reviews, new scholarship, and critical discussions of major topics in the comparative and international field of education.

How can depressed communities be upgraded? One approach is to import settlers with higher incomes. In a unique experiment in Israel, this approach was utilized, and the results are the focus of the Ayalon, Ben-Rafael, and Yogev study.

The three authors examine the costs and benefits of an experiment in community change in Mobiltown. The experiment, which brought higher status people to a poor community, is evaluated on the basis of surveys, indepth interviews, and observations. The research shows that the experiment has mainly resulted in the status enhancement of the community as a whole. Yet, expectations for social integration between the new and veteran residents were not fulfilled. Many of the cultural, economic, commercial, and social developments were based on some form of implicit segregation. The dynamics of unbalanced outcomes are demonstrated in the areas of intergroup attitudes, the formation of social networks, and in the political and educational arenas. The Mobiltown experiment demonstrates how the cost of newly introduced social gaps are countered by the benefits of the status enhancement of the entire community. An important study for sociologists, urban planners, and those concerned with social change in Israel.