The purpose of this research was to determine what a school district in Texas does to have consistent bond approval passages. The qualitative research consisted of three interviews that included six questions to district senior staff participants who closely work on school bonds. Research showed that the district relies on guided and established…

Scholars and legal practitioners of voting rights are concerned with estimating individual-level voting behavior from aggregate-level data. The most commonly used technique, King's ecological inference (EI), has been questioned for inflexibility in multiethnic settings or with multiple candidates. One method for estimating vote support for…

Using clickers in the statistics classroom can help students identify and understand common errors and misconceptions through a combination of surprise and discussion. Students are presented with multiple-choice questions that they discuss with each other and then vote on; a class-wide discussion follows. Questions for which many students vote for…

School libraries remain a hallmark of society. They are places where all students are welcome to use the abundant resources available to them to research topics for class study or explore ideas about which they are curious. At some school libraries it is also a place where students meet with military recruiters, sit for college interviews,…

At least 38 states have created service areas or "districts" for each of their community colleges. However, little is known about the geographic boundaries of community college districts, the political process that defines them, and how they relate to institutional racial segregation. Given this dearth of knowledge, we studied nearly 150…

We recorded the percentage of students voting on each option on every clicker question used in 19 introductory statistics classes. To identify the questions that provide the most useful feedback, we looked for those for which the percentage of students voting correctly varied the most from class to class, producing the largest standard deviations.…

While U.S. voters delivered a significant change in the 2024 federal elections, they opted for steady leadership at the state level. No state board of education shifted in partisan control, and only five seats saw a shift in political party out of 27 races that were contested in the general election. This policy update looks at the results of…

This article shares lessons from committed and inspirational educators from across the country with whom the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) worked in 2020. Their experiences reinforce that nonpartisan teaching about democracy is possible (i.e., not teaching who to vote for, but rather how the system…

The concept of political justice is deeply tied to our professional Code of Ethics. Social workers are well suited to challenge political inequalities that keep clients and communities from political participation. Laws affecting access to voter registration, casting a ballot, and having that ballot counted vary widely across the United States,…

Teachers' positionality within the political landscape has evolved rapidly over recent election cycles. In Texas, nationwide teacher advocacy and anti-teacher state legislation motivated teachers to become politically involved. Increased teacher voting greatly impacted the 2018 election results, which led statewide leaders and legislators of the…

Classroom voting can be an effective way to stimulate student discussions. In this pedagogy, the instructor poses a multiple-choice question to the class, and then allows a few minutes for consideration and small-group discussion before students vote, either with clickers, cell phones, or a non-electronic method. After the vote the instructor…

Texas has one of the largest primary and secondary school systems in the United States. Funding equity has been a concern in the state courts, and significant legislative actions have been taken. We examine two votes taken in the Texas State Legislature in 1993 and 2006 that follow the directives from a series of education finance equity legal…

Higher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students' academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating…

Purpose: Across the United States, a large percentage of school districts are in need of facility improvements to provide safe and adequate buildings to facilitate student learning. To finance new construction, school districts traditionally have put proposals before local voters to fund construction through issuing long-term bonds to finance…

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, controversy grows over recent statewide legislative initiatives that impose stricter identification requirements on voters. These new voter identification laws--especially those that require voters to produce a government-issued photo ID--are the subject of intense debates. During 2011, seven states…