Town meetings or public forums arranged to discuss issues of interest to citizens are as old as the settling of the United States, and they continue today as part of the democratic system. The Public Agenda Foundation maintains this tradition through a special series of community forums, known as the National Issues Forums (NIF), that annually…

This book analyzes a number of issues related to citizen involvement in land-use planning. Based on this analysis, the author recommends a set of organizational principles that can be utilized to develop an integrated, coherent citizen involvement program. The core of the study is a review of several major program design issues that political…

The author states that the Federal Communications Commission is overidentified with the industry it regulates and calls for remedial action. Various proposals are examined and discarded. Basically, what is said to be needed is a structural change--reducing the number of commissioners from seven to five, each appointed for a single term of 15…

This book is a study of the processes through which educational policies are formulated, adopted, and implemented at the national level of government. In particular, the author focuses his attention on policies affecting the programs administered by the U.S. Office of Education during the term of the 90th Congress (1967-68). Although the author's…

The position of black Americans is reassessed in this book. The first step in evaluating where blacks are now is to ask what constitutes progress for blacks in America. A theoretical framework for analyzing the structural position of blacks and for developing criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of racial public policy is developed. Then, an…

This collection of selected readings on day care issues was compiled to provide a more manageable compendium of resources for national policy makers. The selections included date from 1970 to 1972 and were drawn from a wide variety of federally sponsored studies. The readings are organized into six chapters: (1) Day Care as a National Priority,…

The election of Ronald Reagan to President in 1980 marked the political zenith of modern American conservative ideology in the 20th century. This book presents a historical analysis of conservative ideology and its influence on federal school policies during Reagan's first administration, 1981-1984. It examines various conservative social agendas…

In this study, research was conducted over an 18-month period on the nature of population policy in America, its impact on black people, and how black people view its impact. Projections for the nonwhite population to the year 2000 were made by the National Urban League Research Department. Our projections, which are based on the Census Bureau's…

As courts at the local, state, and federal levels take an increasingly large role in formulating educational policy, serious questions arise about the use of social science data in judicial decision-making. The seven papers in this book were first presented at a symposium focusing on an exploration of the manner in which the definitions of…

Demands for urban decentralization and community control are indexes of the inaccessibility, irresponsibility, and unresponsiveness of the institutions of urban government in the 1970's. How and why these institutions have become the focus of such widespread dissatisfaction can be understood only in the total context of urban politics in America,…

This book grew out of an intensive field study of Goldsboro and its school system that aimed at understanding how Goldsboro achieved a farreaching degree of desegregation without disruptive incidents in a system in which whites moved from a position as the majority in their school to a position as the minority. Chapter 1 introduces the study.…

The housing crisis in the United States is primarily urban. Unlike areas of urban blight, rural alums are not slums of despair by any means. "Slums of despair" is a term used in a recent study of urban life to describe those areas in some of our inner cities whose inhabitants feel they are utterly trapped--that they stand little chance of…

This book is organized in four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Basic Nature of Effective Desegregation," explores exactly what effective desegregation means. Chapters 2-4 set forth a prototype--an idealized version--of the process of achieving effective desegregation in an individual school district. The "model" has four basic parts: (1) A set of…

This study of policy making is set in Chicago's school system during the late 1960's. The three case studies presented here identify a school board's response to core issues faced by school policy makers in the largest of the central cities in the United States. After applying both bargaining and unitary models to the Chicago school board's policy…

The Education Working Paper Series is produced by the Education Unit at the World Bank (HDNED). It provides an avenue for World Bank staff to publish and disseminate preliminary education findings to encourage discussion and exchange ideas within the World Bank and among the broader development community. Many factors have contributed to Finland's…