Long-standing discriminatory practices and systematic barriers have perpetuated inequitable access to early childhood resources and opportunities for families living in the United States due to race and ethnicity, income, geographic location, primary languages, gender, and other characteristics. To adequately understand whether child care is…

Over the past three decades, reformers have championed approaches to improving schools that have included state takeovers, school closures, and firing teachers. Despite the prevalence of these policies, these reform efforts have failed to produce strong systems of public education. This article examines Union City schools in New Jersey (USA), a…

School districts across the land are contending with rising education costs and constrained revenues. Ballooning retirement obligations and ever-growing personnel expenditures in particular are leaving many district budgets in the red. Yet state policies for assisting school districts in financial trouble are uneven and complex. Interventions are…

Amid the cacophony of special interests fighting to be heard in statehouses and on Capitol Hill, a cadre of current and former chief state school officers is elbowing its way into the nation's education debate at a time when states are taking more control of K-12 education. A little more than a year old, Chiefs for Change is an invitation-only…

What began as a swashbuckling move by the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, the state's governor, and a newly minted billionaire to reshape the beleaguered Newark school system has turned into a tangle of blowback and counterpunches as skeptics contend the plan would violate state law. At issue is the power-sharing arrangement proposed by the three…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is clear: States are on the hook for advancing education improvement goals spelled out in the law as a condition for receiving up to $100 billion in economic-stimulus aid to education. But school districts are the ones that must decide how to spend most of that aid--including hefty, one-time increases for…

In the past few years, numerous states have initiated school improvement programs. These programs have included any or all of the following characteristics: (1) teacher and administrator certification and competency tests; (2) school-based planning; (3) staff development; (4) student assessment; (5) revised curricula and instructional strategies;…

The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) criticizes state-mandated program-oriented budgeting as limited, laborious, inflexible, and more concerned with efficiency than with sound education. NJEA sets out its own guidelines on school budgeting, which favor the traditional line-item budget. (SJL)

The efforts of states to differentiate regulatory treatment among districts and schools are examined in this paper. Data were derived from case studies of four state programs: Kentucky's Educational Deficiency Program of receivership for troubled districts; New Jersey's Plan to Intervene in Deficient School Districts; South Carolina's Flexibility…

Regional Educational Service Agencies (RESAs)--agencies between the state and local level--are an important resource for helping local educators cope with a variety of pressures from an increasingly complex environment. They do so by performing two functions. Political linkage provides knowledge about the impacts of mandates on specific districts…

The second of two articles addresses recent school finance litigation raised in five states. These decisions appear to have strengthened the concept of education as a state responsibility, so much so that the likelihood of significant reversal toward increased local autonomy appears to be improbable. (MLF)

New Jersey students must pass high school proficiency test to receive state-endorsed high school diploma. Unless 75 percent of third, sixth, eighth grade students in every school score at or above state-prescribed minimal proficiency level in reading, writing, mathematics, school district will flunk state certification standards and face state…

The State of New Jersey mandated that local school districts establish attendance policies beginning September 1, 1981. The purpose of this study is to determine if this mandated policy has produced a significant effect on school attendance, dropout rate, and student performance. A specially developed questionnaire asked 42 principals, randomly…

The New Jersey legislature revised the school funding formula by eliminating $250 million in state aid over 4 years to 150 suburban districts and sending nearly $1 billion more to 30 less affluent districts. Contends that the method will ensure mediocrity and stifle innovation. Proposes three other funding formulas. (MLF)

Analyzes the full-service schools movement and policy development process, focusing on examples of the new state policies as scattered, vulnerable, and promising new developments. Analyzes the Kentucky and New Jersey movements in terms of the strength of state role. The movement needs time to mature before being stringently evaluated. (Contains 28…