When U.S. Sen. Barack Obama launched his bold bid in 2007 for the presidency of the United States, the contingency of college-aged voters was paramount to deciding the outcome of the election. As in past big election years, college students mobilized in large numbers, that year mostly rallying to Obama's call to help him lead a major turnaround in…

The College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards published by the National Council for the Social Studies advocates the need for students not just to acquire and produce knowledge, but also to live a life of active engagement in the workings of our democracy. Dimension Four of the C3 Framework articulates this…

This article presents two lessons. The first one is "Carved in Stone: The Preamble to the Constitution" by Steven S. Lapham. In 1937, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) commissioned artist Lenore Thomas to create some sculptures for the planned community of Greenbelt, Maryland. Part of her work consisted of bas-relief friezes on the…

Purpose: Across the United States, a large percentage of school districts are in need of facility improvements to provide safe and adequate buildings to facilitate student learning. To finance new construction, school districts traditionally have put proposals before local voters to fund construction through issuing long-term bonds to finance…

Given limited resource availability in a developing nation like India, faced with high incidences of crime, it is important to optimize on the resources spent in combating crime by channelling them to proper direction. This requires an understanding of the actual and overall level of crime across India. Our paper provides a complete understanding…

A measure of "clusterability" serves as the basis of a new methodology designed to preserve cluster structure in a reduced dimensional space. Similar to principal component analysis, which finds the direction of maximal variance in multivariate space, principal cluster axes find the direction of maximum clusterability in multivariate space.…

The complexities surrounding public school funding are not unique to Ohio. There have been numerous legal challenges in the State Supreme Courts and seminal cases from the U.S. Supreme Court which have assigned the practices and formulas by which schools are funded to the individual states. Although previous research has investigated voter…

Through its analysis of the rhetorical means by which the US Congress overcame jurisdictional objections to federal action on the issue of woman suffrage, this essay argues that the stasis of jurisdiction operates as a mode of assemblage of discourses, institutions, and populations. In Congress, the woman suffrage issue helped re-organize federal…

Studies on the use of digital voting systems in large group teaching situations have often focused on the "non-anonymity" and control and testing functions that the technology provides. There has also been some interest in how students might use their votes tactically to gain "credits". By focusing on an empirical study of…

This research examines the complex patterns by which distinct dimensions of critical consciousness may lead marginalized adolescents toward distinct forms of political action. Structural equation modeling was applied to nationally representative data from the Civic Education Study (2,811 ninth graders; M[subscript age] = 14.6), first establishing…

From 2009 to 2011, a team from the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies carried out a mixed-methods study of young people in England and Singapore. With regard to civic attitudes, the study showed that there was a greater sense of political self-efficacy and collective (school) efficacy in Singapore than in…

Broad inferences have been made that the election of a Black American President indicates that America now functions in a post-racist society. This optimism has fueled a major discussion for changes in American policies which directly affect minorities; in particular, those related to affirmative action in higher education are under attack. Due to…

This chapter presents an analysis on civic values in the Mexican and German youth population (high school education students), considering the set of capabilities and civic dispositions that mobilize young people of both countries, and which together reflect the calls "civic virtues", with the purpose of knowing what characterizes the…

This study explores how the language minority provisions in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) affect Latino voter registration. We are particularly interested in how these provisions affect Latino citizens with varying levels of English language proficiency. Using data from the 2006 National Latino Survey, we find that Latino citizens with limited…

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, controversy grows over recent statewide legislative initiatives that impose stricter identification requirements on voters. These new voter identification laws--especially those that require voters to produce a government-issued photo ID--are the subject of intense debates. During 2011, seven states…