Many U.S. states provide public funding for charter schools--deregulated and privately managed schools operating in direct competition with government-run schools. While the impact of charter schools on student achievement and sorting has been intensely studied, less is known about the demand for these alternatives. Using precinct-level returns…

This paper examines whether there is a continued gender gap in the political interest and engagement of first-year college students enrolled in introductory American politics classes. Using data from a survey completed by over 2,000 students at 20 colleges and universities across the United States, we look for variations in students' plans to…

Public libraries were indispensable resources for newcomers during the height of European immigration to the United States. They were havens for the poor and jobless during the Great Depression and bridges between rural and urban communities during times of major demographic change. An increase in the Spanish-speaking population has inspired…

This paper asks, in the context of recent legislative changes, what can be done to support more citizens in England and Wales with learning disabilities to vote in national elections? This issue is addressed through (i) a review of recent disability access campaigns that have reported discrimination against, and the under-representation of, adults…

Teachers live for the "teachable moments"--those opportunities to connect their subject content to events taking place beyond the classroom. They can occur spontaneously, lucky occasions to bring the curriculum to life grabbed on the fly. In other instances, a teachable moment looms large. In hundreds of thousands of classrooms nationwide,…

The persistence of adolescents' political attitudes and behaviors into adulthood is a perennial concern in research on developmental psychology. While some authors claim that adolescents' attitudinal patterns will remain relatively stable throughout the life cycle, others argue that the answers of adolescents in political surveys have but a…

Education issues are poised to break through the din of presidential politics and economic anxiety in more than a dozen states next month, as voters confront ballot questions and constitutional amendments involving K-12 policy and school finance. High on the list are gambling referendums in six states--Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Maryland,…

This paper estimates changes in the effects of educational attainment and college quality on three cohorts of students observed during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Consistent with most of the prior literature, I find that educational attainment and college quality raise earnings, and the magnitudes of these effects have increased over time. The…

The "International Society for the Social Studies (ISSS) Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. The following papers are included in the 2015 proceedings: (1) Local History and Local Culture at the Core of Elementary Social Studies Curriculum (C.…

Every day, 14 retired teachers and other school employees arrive at the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers' headquarters and go to work for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The retirees--working with volunteers and union staff members from as far away as Alaska--are working to inform teachers' union members why the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)…

Typically, the period between the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in mid-January and the end of Black History Month in February sees serious and sober public discussions about the state of Black America. Those discussions have heated up earlier than expected due to the November release of a national survey on Black social progress by the…

The considerable debate in recent years on the aims of citizenship education has not been accompanied by an equally substantial discussion on the educational processes involved. This article puts forward a theoretical framework, referred to as "curricular transposition", for understanding the complex task of realizing normative ideals of…

Over 40 years ago the historic Kerner Commission Report declared that America was undergoing an urban crisis whose effects were disproportionately felt by underclass populations. In "America's Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-blind Politics", Curtis Ivery and Joshua Bassett explore the persistence of this crisis today, despite public…

In the postbellum southern U.S., African Americans were steadily disenfranchised, a modern publicly financed universal school system with racially segregated schools was created, and public school monies were allocated so that white pupils received substantially more than black pupils. An earlier paper (Ng and Halcoussis 2003) established a…

From 1998 to 2008, voters in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts passed anti-bilingual education ballot initiatives that required English-only instruction for the vast majority of the states' English language learners. The contentious political discourse leading up to the votes largely ignored the research on best practices for educating…