Search the net and summarize

Hi,
I am a weekly column writer in a Saudi newspaper. I tend to support my articles (dedicated to Education) with international experience or best practices as reported in the related literature. Doing a small search into the related literature consolidates my background and backs up my article’s assumptions.
Apart from writing in the newspaper, I work for a company; therefore, I lack free time to find such literature or read it thoroughly.

For a subject I am about to deal with, I need you to search the related literature and summarize main ideas. I am going to provide you with the subject description and the key intended areas for my article.

Readers in our country welcome highly the west experience as well as some Asian educationally advanced countries experience such as Korea, Singapore and Malesia. For this reason, I have to support my articles with comparative analysis over these countries. I mean by this to show how X or Y issue is dealt with in Country 1, Country 2, or Country 3, etc. And then to find out the reasons of success for each. I will use all of this information to come to a conclusion by comparing those success factors to what is available in my country. What I expect from you is preparing all of this information except the last part which is related to conclusions.
I expect you to cover the following countries when finding literature (as you know, some International Education research works cover a set of countries in comparative studies)
1. USA
2. UK
3. Finland
4. Germany
5. Other European countries as available.
6. Russia
7. Australia and New Island
8. Japan
9. Asian Tigers (Korea, Singapore, Malesia, India) as available.

I will start with the two following two subjects. You can start with either of those.

Student Rights
Almost all literature and gov. reports define student rights in the scope of the right to go to school. For my article series this is not the aim but areas such as examination justice, fair treatment in the classroom, minimum accepted teacher behaviors. Some key ideas in this respect are:
- Are students given the chance to discuss with their teacher why they obtained their exam score? Are they eligible to object and on what basis? Can they review their answers and correction?
- Can students make grievance pertaining to testing circumstances such as time, weather, comfort, or any other factor that might have affected their performance?
- Can students (or their parents) raise the problem of false/wrong information delivered during the lesson (or in an exam maybe?)
- Are students given enough information on issues related to their academic life, extracurricular activities, safety within the school, health considerations, etc.
- Are parents kept aware of their children achievement levels? And on what pace?
- Are students protected from their teacher’s explicit and implicit threats? How?
- Is student health in school protected by policies that oblige the school to maintain their health especially those with permanent or temporary illness cases?
- Is there enough special policies and procedures for special needs students?
- How law protect students in school, be it in terms to what is addressed in the school policies or national policies.
These are only few examples of what a student rights document could include. It would be great to find similar examples of student rights documents for KG-12 education level as well as for university level students? To what extent these documents cover subject items such as those we denoted here?

Also, I would like to see if there are any research literature pertaining to this specific area? It will be useful also if there are some proposals or discussions in research or articles (could be a periodical journal article or well recognized public magazine/newspaper).
My intention is to write a series of 4-5 articles to raise this issue and elaborate on it. I might even include full citations of some legal/ethical articles from other countries’ student rights documents. I will dedicate a series of articles for KG-12 education level and another series for the higher education level.

Arts education and Physical Education:
What is the situation of teaching these two subjects around the world? In Saudi Arabia these are compulsory but not assessed to towards student’s graduation level and these are lesson weekly thus consume a lot of education budget with a minimal outcome. In some other countries, these are optional where the student could choose to go to a different subject maybe. The main questions of this task are as follows:

- Compulsory or optional?
- If compulsory, is it assessed towards the student’s graduation level?
- How many weekly hours?
- Is there a definite teacher? What is their specialization if yes?
- What are the key goals of teaching this subject(s)?
- Any other additional information you could find valuable.