Purpose: School principals' commitment and motivation have not been systematically investigated, but concerted research is needed as 25% of principals leave their jobs each year. This article investigates how new school principals make sense of their motivation to challenging work in a high pressure, high turnover field. Understanding principal…

Valid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers, but conventional classroom observations are costly, prone to rater bias, and hard to implement at scale. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel…

We study personnel flexibility in charter schools by exploring how teacher retention varies with teacher and school quality in Massachusetts. Charters are more likely to lose their highest and lowest value-added teachers. Low performers tend to exit public education, while high performers tend to switch to traditional public schools. To…

The Israeli education system is divided and segregated along the lines of nationality and religiosity. While Israeli society and its education system, in particular, have generally been subjected to the influence of globalisation, including universal discourses of citizenship, in many ways it remains highly particularistic and nationalistic. To a…

Social work relies heavily on its value base to guide practice; however, there are no conceptual models--on par with person-in-environment (PIE)--to describe how these values are implemented within an evidence-based approach. However, the philosophical foundation of empiricism and positivism that lends PIE its strength also brings with it inherent…

The hum of florescent lights still drone quietly in the background just as they did in the high school art classrooms of the authors, only now they are teaching research methods and educational theory and practice in the academy, not sculpture, ceramics, drawing, or painting 1 Occasionally we refer to Sara's and Kelly's experiences as high school…

While focusing on "Democracy and Education," James Campbell attempts in this essay to offer a synthesis of the full range of John Dewey's educational thought. Campbell explores in particular Dewey's understanding of the relationship between democracy and education by considering both his ideas on the reconstruction of education and on…

While "Democracy and Education" is often cited within the scholarship on and teaching of social justice education, it and Dewey's work generally remain underutilized. Peter Nelsen argues in this essay that Deweyan pragmatism offers rich resources for social justice education by exploring how Dewey's three-part conception of growth has…

It is in the interest of scholarly journals to publish important research and of researchers to publish in important journals. One key to making the case for the importance of research in a scholarly article is to incorporate value arguments. Yet there has been no rhetorical analysis of value arguments in the literature. In the context of…

This article provides a précis of Kristján Kristjánsson's 2015 book, "Aristotelian Character Education," under discussion in the present issue.

Of enduring interest to philosophers of education is the intimate connection Dewey draws between "Democracy and Education" in this now century-old seminal work. At first glance the connection may appear quite simple, with the two terms commonly combined today as "democratic education". But there is significantly more to Dewey's…

This article responds to Johan Dahlbeck's "Towards a pure ontology: Children's bodies and morality" ["Educational Philosophy and Theory," vol. 46 (1), 2014, pp. 8-23 (EJ1026561)]. His arguments from Nietzsche and Spinoza do not carry the weight he supposes, and the conclusions he draws from them about pedagogy would be…

There is widespread disagreement about what equality of opportunity in education requires. For some it is that each child is legally permitted to go to school. For others it is that each child receives the same educational resources. Further interpretations abound. This fact presents a problem: when politicians or academics claim they are in…

This paper revisits "Democracy and Education" with the purpose of recuperating Dewey's understanding of the nature and importance of "discipline" and conforming education to the "interest of the child," two parts of Dewey's work (and therefore of progressive education) widely misunderstood by both Dewey's critics and…

The day-to-day appraisal of the state of the nation is understandably dominated by the stories in the headlines. In "Coming Apart" (Murray, 2012), the author attempted to step back from today's headlines and take a longer view of where the nation is heading. Murray's conclusion was that we face a much more ominous long-term problem than…