Analyzes the rhetoric of the 1850s' Know-Nothing party, the first national political party to use nativism successfully in its platform. Concludes that nativist rhetoric's success and failure lies in the traditional values party members used to overcome the constraints traditionally imposed upon the nativist response to the rhetorical situation.…

This monograph examines the history and politics of educational reform in Ghana. Using data from interviews conducted with senior policy-makers, implementers and researchers, as well as documentary sources, to explore the drivers and inhibitors of change at the political, bureaucratic and grass-roots levels. The monograph explores the nature of…

This monograph appears midway through the development of a book on the future of teaching, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2010. The book is a team effort, undertaken by 12 accomplished educators from across the United States, who have agreed to systematically study and speculate about public education and the teaching profession in the…

When governments and pressure groups attend only to research that suits their political purposes, it makes a mockery of the idea of evidence-informed policy and practice. In this article, the author cites examples of research that picked up weak and misleading evidence for political purposes. The author argues that researchers are tied in to the…

In the vast and diverse literature on determinants of life-satisfaction and happiness, there is a relative dearth of empirical research on the role of specifically political factors. We identify one such possible factor, the industrial welfare state, and assess its impact on how individuals perceive their well-being. The voluminous literature on…

This paper explores the relevance of extra local market linkages and local-level social capital to sustainable livelihood outcomes in two agrarian communities on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. Contextualized by the specificity of Mexico's transition from state-directed rural development to neoliberally-guided rural development in the 1990s, findings…

In this paper I shift the center of utopian debates away from questions of ideology towards the question of power. As a new point of departure, I analyze Foucault's notion of biopower as well as Hardt and Negri's theory of biopolitics. Arguing for a new hermeneutic of biopolitics in education, I then apply this lens to evaluate the educational…

A critical historical review of the tensions in American governance places the method choice debate in a broader perspective. This chapter reviews the factors that influence the evaluation questions posed to evaluators and, in turn, the methods choices that stem from it. Political and professional pressures on the evaluators also influence methods…

The purpose of this study is to review how special education administration and leadership has been conceptualized over time and to examine the extent to which current calls for preparing educational leaders to address diversity, teamwork, and technology are manifested in the literature. To that end, the authors provide an analysis of 474 article…

Following World War II, fear rooted in Communist paranoia gripped America. This distress seeped into all aspects of American culture, including education. The American people became increasingly worried that Communist influences would infiltrate the schools and pervert the minds of children. At the forefront of this quagmire was Dr. Earl James…

American science education is plagued by a fundamental confusion--a mismatch between goals claimed to be valued and the strategies used to achieve them. This confusion is rooted in the seemingly simple idea that science education should prepare students for the future. For some, this "preparation" is about good citizenship and a satisfying life.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore ethical challenges and dilemmas that exist within admissions systems at colleges and universities in the USA. Design/methodology/approach: Although the issues considered herein are examined primarily from the perspective of admissions officers, this paper also considers the viewpoint of prospective…

This book is an in-depth examination of education and media under occupation. The contributors to this volume engage dialogue to explore these domains and their roles and functioning under occupation while keeping an eye toward resolution, using the on-going conflict between Palestine and Israel as the focus. The uniqueness of this collection is…

This paper provides an account of the ways in which literacy, in different languages, was embedded in the East Timorese struggle against the Indonesian invasion and subsequent occupation, from 1975 to 1999. Our account is primarily historiographical in nature and is based on a corpus of written texts gathered during four phases of the struggle, on…

This paper presents a phenomenographic study that was carried out at the University of Cyprus Department of Education, aiming at the investigation of student teacher perceptions of citizenship, nationality, community and their relationship with human rights. The study showed a continuum of perceptions about citizenship, which are discussed in line…