School transportation experts consider the following essential rules in purchasing school buses: know your geography; know federal and state regulations; write specifications carefully; plan for replacement and growth; check out prospective bidders; keep up with recent trends; and remain flexible. New Jersey enacted a law last year requiring seat…

Examines the options for upgrading, replacing, and removal or closure of underground storage tanks (UST). Reveals the diverse regulatory control involving USTs, the Environmental Protection Agency's interest in pursuing violators, and stresses the need for administrators to be knowledgeable about state and local agency definitions of regulated…

Discusses qualifying students with high-incidence disabilities as eligible for special education. Examines relationships between authoritative definitions of disabilities, federal and state regulations, assessments conducted that are designed to measure the criteria in the regulations, and the use of assessment data in assigning children to…

Reviews issues surrounding college tuition discounting, and outlines sources of confusion, defines various discount types, provides historical background prior to recent changes in fund accounting rules, describes the new rules' impact, outlines different uses of tuition discounting by three groups, and applies the accumulated definitions to an…

After 25 years of federal Title IX regulation, only three dozen of the top 300 college athletics programs are in compliance. Women receive less than 40% of athletic scholarships. College sports are locked into a budgetary structure that favors two dominant men's sports, football and basketball. Divisive rhetoric and resistance delay balanced…

Following a brief consideration of the role of rhetoric in law, science, and policy, explores how rhetorical accounts of new technologies influence the course of legislative, judicial, and regulatory decisions. Proposes that such themes have the powerful capacity to determine outcomes and to shape modern concepts of both individual and societal…

Administrators looking for budget relief might look for cost savings in pupil transportation. The basic school bus that meets federal standards, with no optional equipment, is the safest vehicle on the road. The best investment in a transportation program is driver training. Route and schedule changes might lead to an increase in efficiency…

Higher education has an important stake in the national effort to widely deploy a state-of-the-art broadband public network. The Broadband Policy Group (BPG) developed a set of three principles to provide a consistent frame of reference for pursuing policy initiatives: (1) affordable broadband access; (2) a new regulatory structure; and (3)…

Evidence is mounting that federal employees and their agents may have directed or even pressured states to choose specific assessments, consultants, and the criteria for evaluating core reading programs as conditions for getting funding under the Reading First initiative, possibly in violation of federal law. "Education Week" found such…

State leaders have just begun counting the billions of dollars it will take for schools in the Gulf Coast region to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Schools around the country, meanwhile, continue to welcome the estimated 300,000-plus students displaced by the storm--some 50,000 of whom were learning that their home schools would likely be closed…

Is California's Imperial Valley a watershed? If so, at what level and by what topographic logic? Is it a region? If so, at what level and by what geographic logic? Are its boundaries natural, political, or multivalent on different scales? In short, this essay looks at the special (re)production of environmental conditions within a cyborg world.…

On June 30, the Bush administration imposed new regulations sharply curtailing already-limited travel to Cuba. A New York Times article published on June 24 characterized the regulations as "part of a broader plan that President Bush announced last month to be tougher on President Fidel Castro and speed a transition to democracy in Cuba.…

The Department of Education's announcement of new leeway in meeting federal teacher-quality demands was praised as welcome relief by many education leaders. But others, including two pivotal congressional Democrats, charged that the action would lower expectations for teachers in rural communities. Facing widespread complaints about the…

The reauthorization of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" ("ESEA") as amended by the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" ("NCLB") relied on two notable policy instruments to improve education: accountability and flexibility. "NCLB" complements accountability with several new flexibility…

Section 504 is a civil rights statute mandating that persons with disabilities have equal access to all programs receiving federal financial assistance. Many initially interpreted Section 504 as a prohibition against employment discrimination in the schools because the overall act was concerned primarily with discrimination in employment settings.…