Contents:
1.Introduction: the Struggles for Reform Margaret McLaughlin and Martyn Rouse 2.Defining Difference: a Comparative Perspective on Legal and Policy Issues in Education Reform and Special Educational Needs Lani Florian and Diana Pullin 3.Standards and Curriculum: the Core of Educational Reform Margaret J. McLaughlin and Christina Tilstone 4.National Assessment and Special Education in the United States and England and Wales: Towards a Common System for All? Martyn Rouse, James G. Shriner and Lou Danielson 5.Educational Accountability and Students with Disabilities in the United States and in England and Wales Judy Sebba, Martha L. Thurlow and Margaret Goertz 6.Special Educational Needs Policy and Choice: Tensions Between Policy Development in the US and UK Contexts Cheryl Lange and Sheila Riddell 7.The Dying Governance of Education and Its Comparative Impact on Special Education in the United Kingdom and the United States Jennifer Evans and Michael M. Gerber 8.Funding of Special Education in the United States and England and Wales Tony Bowers and Tom Parrish

This book is about how special education policy and practice is being negotiated within the context of educational reform in two countries. The political climate of recent years in both Britain and the USA led to many changes along similar lines, with a move towards placing greater power and choice in the hands of those individuals with special educational needs. Each chapter provides an overview and comparative analysis of the origins and evolution of specific educational reforms in the USA and the UK. The themes explored include: providing parents with greater choice decentralising decision making making the whole curriculum available to all accountability funding the necessary changes.

Cassandra Nottingham, the noted garden writer, is suffering from the winter doldrums. So when Oliver Dickens, the owner of an antiquarian Victorian book store, asks her to give a series of evening garden lectures Cass reluctantly agrees. As soon as she meets the participants her misgivings rise to despair. Few of them know anything about gardening. The only enticement is the book store's tea room where the chef, surly Norman Tringle, serves delicious pastries and lunches. At the second lecture, just as Cass is ready to throw in the towel, someone using a highly unusual weapon murders one of the participants. Cass rushes into the search for the murderer as she finds herself pitted against a seven-foot policeman who tries to thwart her at every turn, as well as the other participants who have their own motives for taking the class, none of which have anything to do with Victorian gardening. Increasingly frustrated by the winter Puget Sound rains and Detective Inspector Thrupp, Cass races against the clock to uncover a diabolical plot designed to result in a second murder.

Self-confident, smart and relentlessly curious, Cassandra Nottingham, a nationally recognized garden writer, is one of the attendees at a horticultural conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. While she looks forward to the usual round of cocktail parties, dinners and verbal skirmishes with her fellow rival garden writers, highest on her agenda is spending time with David Caldwell, a nursery owner attending the conference and her friend but not, sadly for Cass, her lover. Although she joked about how interesting it would be if one of her hated rivals were murdered at the conference, she's totally unprepared for the actuality. Determined to solve what turns out to be an attempted murder using a rare plant poison, followed by an actual murder by strangulation, Cass, along with her adversary, Detective Inspector Fairweather, races to catch the killer, a person who uses two different murder methods which throw everyone off the track. Cass and the Gluttonous Gardener also pits Cass against her fellow seminar attendees, all of whom have secrets and, Cass suspects, murderous intentions. She moves from one potential solution to another in her quest to find the killer before the police pin her with the crime, or the killer selects her as the next victim.