At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the United States is entering a period of unprecedented demographic shifts affecting higher education. Not only are many states already seeing fewer high-school graduates, with more facing this trend as the decade progresses, but in all but a few regions overall population growth will level and…

Across American higher education, institutional consolidations are on the rise. In particular, multiple state systems have proposed or completed mergers of regional universities and/or community colleges with the stated goal of increasing efficiency. Despite the high-profile nature of some recent successful and failed consolidations, there is…

The challenge of reopening US public schools in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has high-lighted the significant role that local teachers unions play in setting policy. The politics of school reopening during the pandemic has brought to the national spotlight the outsized role that teachers unions play in managing big cities. Bureau of Labor…

The New England Board of Higher Education "NEBHE" has been deeply interested in how New England higher education institutions can collaborate with one another and with other leaders to confront threats to their economic sustainability. These threats stem partly from shifts in academic content and delivery, student demography and…

This paper describes and justifies the protocol for a research project investigating regional secondary school consolidation reforms in New South Wales, Australia. The study is designed to describe the experiences of those directly involved in the transition to a consolidated school in a way that has so far eluded educational leadership…

This essay provides an overview of the huelga schools established in Houston, Texas, in 1970. For 2 years, from 1970 to 1972, the Mexican American community opposed the Houston Independent School District's plan to integrate the schools by pairing so-called White Mexican Americans with African American students. While they protested this decision,…

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

The effects of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 continue to challenge school business officials (SBOs) and other education leaders as they strive to prepare students for the global workforce. Economists have borrowed a word from chemistry to describe this state of affairs: hysteresis--the lingering effects of the past on the present. Today's SBOs…

Political pressure to reduce the number of higher education institutions in Wales has been sustained for over a decade by three successive ministers for education, two of whom, Jane Davidson and the current incumbent, Leighton Andrews, have left the Welsh sector in no doubt about the strength of their personal commitment to the policy of…

This article focuses on five women's experiences "making it" as rhetoricians with children. Expanding the definition of success Michelle Ballif, Diane Davis and Roxanne Mountford set forth in "Women's Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition," the article offers suggestions for moving toward more family-friendly academic structures, not least…

In 2008, the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation began the social studies textbook adoption process. Concurrently, the Indiana State Board of Education wrote a memo encouraging schools to look at digital resources; BCSC did not hesitate. This article describes why BCSC chose to move to a digital format at the secondary level, the process…

The school district is the fundamental administrative unit of schooling in the United States and the superintendent the lead official. The nature and the challenges of this position, however, vary across the landscape. Because most superintendents lead rural districts, the challenges facing those districts are the ones that typically bedevil the…

District consolidation is a highly emotional process. One key to success is sticking to the facts. In Iowa, school districts facing financial difficulties or enrollment concerns do not have to move directly to consolidation. In many cases, districts begin by developing sharing agreements. These sharing agreements may start with simple sharing of…

It is no accident that the staff at Fieldale-Collinsville Middle School adopted a central tenet of "Breaking Ranks in the Middle"--to banish anonymity by creating a personalized learning environment for all of its students. The school was created six years ago when the four middle schools in Henry County, VA, were consolidated into two…

High-poverty schools in rural areas and small towns are under attack from state policy makers who want to consolidate these schools in order to save money. In addition to calls for consolidation, rural schools also are threatened by unfair and inadequate funding formulas.