The authors of this article describe three student-driven learning modules developed from their respective College Fed Challenge courses. These activities are ready-to-apply in a wide range of courses to facilitate adoption without a large time commitment. In the "Pick a Policy Maker" module, students gain an understanding of the…

Community college student affairs and services units are foundation to students' academic goals and success. As such, these professionals are often central to the critical initiatives and trends developing throughout 2-year institutions to support the overarching goals of student success. For the most part, these initiatives originated during…

Scholars of political economy have raised the question of whether recent populist movements around the world signal the decline of neoliberal hegemony. What would such a decline mean for education policy, an arena that has been dominated by a neoliberal common sense for several decades? This study investigates the policy discourse of former U.S.…

This paper examines prime minister Robert Menzies decision to support science education in Australian schools in 1963. This was a landmark shift in policy for the federal government, but in many ways mirrors the decision of Eisenhower who brought down the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. The paper uses a transnational approach to…

Purpose: In December 2015, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was a long overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. What is remarkable about this new federal legislation is that it explicitly reverses the decades-long federal effort to more tightly couple the U.S. educational system. While not…

In this article, I describe a recent scandal involving collusion between officials at the American Psychological Association (APA) and the U.S. Department of Defense, which appears to have enabled the torture of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The scandal is a relevant, complex, and engaging case that teachers can use in a…

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has had concerns about student debt for decades. Her recent solution seeks to redistribute tax revenue from the richest Americans to enable students to refinance their postgraduation indebtedness; this would allow students to benefit from the low interest rates in today's financial markets. The Massachusetts…

This article reports on an investigation to explore the possibility that ideology might be expressed in the treatment of corporate influence on federal government by social studies textbooks. Two textbooks were examined in the study--United States history and American government. Corporate influence involves activities that affect election and…

In classic Western movies, the good guy could be frequently identified by his trademark white Stetson hat, whereas the bad guy always wore black. James J. Gallagher wore many hats during his career that spanned over six decades; he too would be known as the "man in the white hat,"--trusted to do the right thing. From 1967 to 1970,…

During a discussion with a panel of speakers from All of Us or None, an organization fighting for the rights of people who have been imprisoned, nearly every student in Andy Peck's senior economics class at Berkeley High School in California spoke of family members or friends who were currently locked up or formerly incarcerated, back on their…

This paper considers the coercive sterilization of Aboriginal women in legislated and non-legislated form in Canada. I provide an historical and materialist critique of coercive sterilization. I argue for coercive sterilization to be understood as one of many policies employed to undermine Aboriginal women, to separate Aboriginal peoples from…

This paper examines the pattern of decision-making, lobbying, and influence that led to the landmark series of federal student assistance policies introduced by Jean Chretien's Liberal government in the late 1990s. The package of new initiatives--dubbed the Canada Opportunities Strategy--not only partially reversed an earlier period of fiscal…

Democracy has been weakened in the United Kingdom with citizens increasingly frustrated at not being able to shape government decisions in any meaningful way. State actions at the local and national level are at risk of becoming even more influenced by vested private interests. This poses a major challenge to the democratic health of the country.…

Purpose: Theories of the policy process recognize that policy proposals are typically generated, debated, redrafted, and accepted for consideration through the gradual accumulation of knowledge within communities of specialists. Thus, to inform long-term care (LTC) reform efforts, we conducted a Web-based survey of 1,147 LTC specialists…

This article seeks to explain the nature of the arguments the Iroquois presented to the US government in trying to prevent their removal. In the letters they wrote to the federal government from the 1830s to the 1850s they emphasized their own law as well as that of the United States. They drew on whatever perception of law they deemed was best…