In the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, many state level public opinion polls, particularly in the Upper Midwest, incorrectly predicted the winning candidate. One leading explanation for this polling miss is that the precipitous decline in traditional polling response rates led to greater reliance on statistical methods to adjust for the…

Two movies about events in 1963 and 1972 are discussed. They are Rustin and Shirley. The movies concern the actions of Bayard Rustin in organizing the March on Washington for Peace and Jobs and the actions of Shirley Chisholm in organizing her campaign for the Presidency of the United States. The events took place more than half a century ago.…

Teacher strikes have gained national attention with the "#RedforEd" movement. Such strikes are polarizing events that could serve to elevate education as a political priority or cast education politics in a negative light. We investigate this empirically by collecting original panel data on U.S. teacher strikes, which we link to…

This essay concerns the political and social psychological roots of the White American electorate's decision to elect Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States in 2016. The author explains how the Trump presidency is an iconoclastic reaction by the White American electorate to the country's first African American president, Barack…

Using a social justice framework provides opportunities to engage pre-service and in-service teachers in reflexive thinking centered on issues of access, equity, and social justice. This is particularly prudent in light of recently documented cases of injustice. In attempting to undertake a critical stance, there is value in embracing what Freire…

Going back a quarter century to 1992, our last three presidents all made education an integral issue of their campaigns. However, education has been largely absent during the 2016 presidential contest. Why is education not drawing much attention? For most people, education is not as urgent as national security and the economy. Much of education's…

Among the lessons that emerged after the recent presidential election is a recognition that teachers are generally not prepared to address the intersections of healing, politics, and emotion in classrooms. Now, more than ever, English educators must address trauma in classrooms, while also recognizing how individuals and groups are positioned…

When the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates head into the general election this fall, they will be courting votes from a statewide electorate that has dramatically shifted over time, mirroring the political polarization that is happening across the country. Over the last three decades, Wisconsin's political geography has evolved…

This paper examines the complex relationship between the state, civil society and education through comparative research with young people in France and the UK. Survey data derived from two cohorts of school students in South Wales and Lyon reveal strong differences in their levels of civic and political participation. While our Welsh students…

The "beauty and truth" in the title reminds one of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." That is not only a great Romantic poem, but also a highly sophisticated rhetorical discourse. In it, the interwoven voices of the speaker, of the Urn, and of Keats himself as an implied author, exploit the ambivalence and ambiguity of the…

In this perspectives brief, authors James Kvaal and Jessica Thompson explore the challenge of college affordability and summarize the campaign proposals to address it. Driven by steadily rising college costs and student debt, the 2020 presidential campaign has put the issues of college costs and student debt on the agenda as never before. Many…

Political parties in the U.S. are composed of networks of interest groups, according to the extended party network theory. Scholars have focused on national extended party networks. We use the case of education interest groups to explore how policy environments shape party networks on the state level. Using 145,000 campaign contributions from 2000…

This article casts a critical eye on the political moment in the US and the world, ushered in by the election and governance of a person who, in my opinion, enacts openly racist, sexist, authoritarian and narcissist views in both his decisions and being as the US President. The author argues that this is also a moment to stand in steadfastness…

Given the nature of the Electoral College system, the two major political parties concentrate on winning the electoral votes of those states in which the preference of voters are divided evenly. Thus, the parties and their candidates ignore states such as Wyoming and Oklahoma, which are reliably Republican, and they ignore states such as…

The principal opportunities awaiting the Trump administration in K-12 education are only loosely related to the candidate's campaign comments about advancing school choice and reducing the federal Education Department. Recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act signals that Congress will be loath to re-open the major federal K-12 programs…