"Getting poor kids out of failing schools" sounds like an altruistic cause most Americans support. However, one policy mechanism utilized to achieve that result, parental choice vouchers, has a checkered past. This descriptive analysis explores the policy-bubble created when state legislators eschewed their constitutional responsibility…

The intent of a liberal arts education is to expose students to a broad array of ideas and subject matter. Its perceived weakness involves the possible lack of preparedness for the workplace; a liberal arts education is deliberately not vocational. To bridge that divide colleges and universities, in cooperation with industry, non-profits, and the…

The nation faces a youth citizenry that is disengaged and lacks the necessary knowledge, skills and dispositions to participate in and carry out their civic duties. This ECS Policy Brief summarizes the state-level goals and accomplishments of the Youth Legislative Engagement project and is intended for state policymakers, education leaders and…

This paper examines various ways in which states, colleges, and universities are balancing tensions between demands for greater institutional autonomy and demands for greater accountability to state legislatures. Noted are the states' varying fiscal situations, mixed messages on autonomy given by state governments to institutions, and increasing…

This report summarizes efforts of the Task Force on State-Tribal Relations of the National Conference of State Legislatures to bring together state legislators, Native American leaders, and other parties interested in seeking new approaches to state-tribal relations. The report incorporates the results of a national survey of state-tribal…

State higher education policy-making processes can evoke or avoid public consideration of underlying tensions in postsecondary education. A study of imposition of out-of-state enrollment limits at the University of North Carolina, and its effects on the Chapel Hill campus, suggests contemporary dynamics of state policy-making can suppress…

The opinions of Pennsylvania educational and legislative leaders on four issues of critical importance to higher education in the state were evaluated. For the two issue areas of enrollment and resources, respondents were asked through interviews and a questionnaire to make projections for the 1980s, to identify the group or agency that should be…

Some common questions that state legislators have about how distance learning can work in their states are explored. Distance learning, once considered strictly a rural education strategy, is now recognized to have the potential to provide solutions to some of the problems states face in delivering quality education to all students. A distance…