This paper introduces the reader to think tanks, institutes, foundations, and their roles in shaping U.S. educational policy. Quite simply, think tanks, institutes, and foundations are nonprofit organizations that both produce and rely on research and expertise to aggressively influence the public, political leaders, and policy. Via an analysis of…

This paper is focused on school self-evaluation in the Czech Republic. It offers the overview of main changes which took place after 1989 and provided a broad social framework for operation of schools. Also, it links self-evaluation to recent legislation which explicitly determines its state of art and also steps to be taken in the near future.…

This Brief summarizes a report prepared to assist the U.S. Department of Education's College and Career Transitions Initiative (CCTI). The report presents a sample of state-level policies and legislation that support the implementation of career pathways and other strategies that facilitate educational and employment transitions. Data gathering…

The political educator takes the perspective that, in Thomas Hobbes's phrase, "man is not born fit for society." To make him so fit, contemporary political educators seek to develop individual autonomy and democratic affect, which would have the added task of reforming all of society in the future. The current consensus holds that the…

The proliferation of high-quality independent charter schools is constrained by the shortage of founders committed to evidence-based school designs and possessing the broad-ranging skills to make good on their audacious plans. The time and energies of such exceptional leaders are deployed over years in building schools that rarely reach more than…

Between November 2004, and March 2005, the Center for Civic Education conducted a survey of alumni from the We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution program. Altogether, 522 alumni responded, ranging in age from 18-34. The primary focus of the study was on voting and other forms of political engagement. Due to self-selection by respondents,…

In 1987 a project was undertaken to assess the status of African Americans in the United States in the topical areas to be addressed by the National Research Council's Study Committee on the Status of Black Americans: education, employment, income and occupations, political participation and the administration of justice, social and cultural…

This book provides a shifting interplay of the terms pedagogy, democracy, and feminism around the idea of an emancipatory political project. Chapter 1, "Remapping Pedagogical Boundaries: Critical Pedagogy, Feminism, and a Discourse of Possibility," examines the pedagogical within a discourse of critique and possibility, and discusses the…

Policies exist in every aspect of people's lives from the landlord's policy on pets to the government's policy on literacy. As such, policy becomes the ideal place to begin to examine the articulation of distance education because policy inevitably marks the site where different kinds of political discourses and social practices intersect. By…

Given the different economic policy approaches of the two candidates for the 2000 presidential election, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies analyzed and assessed the plans put forth by both candidates, focusing on the expected impacts on African Americans. Six analyses were…

This paper explores links between teachers' learning, the politics and practices of education reform, and teacher identity, examining how teachers learn to negotiate the spaces between promises of improvement, effectiveness, and accountability made in heterogeneous discourses of education reform and their experiences with deteriorating material…

This Occasional Paper uses historical and recent concerns about mathematics and science content standards to demonstrate conflict and tensions that surround the process of setting standards. The tension between flexible and specific standards is analyzed. No simple recipe will resolve differing viewpoints, but this Occasional Paper analyzes key…

To allow student writing to reach a broader audience, in 1999 political science educators and students at California State University Chico (CSUC) began a student journal in which exemplary student writing on political themes could be published. The resulting journal, "Studium: The California State University, Chico Student Journal of…

This paper describes the year-long process of building a set of peer comparators for Oregon's seven diverse public universities to serve the analytic needs of budgeting, performance measurement, and trend analysis. Some underlying assumptions informed the development of the peer groups: because several critical political issues required…

This publication by the U.S. Department of Education is an unofficial version of the Department's General Administrative Regulations. The volume incorporates final regulations that the Department published too late to appear in the official July 1, 1998, version of Title 34 of the Code of Federal Regulations issued by the Office of the Federal…