"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) To Be Continued: Congress Enacts Temporary Funding Mechanism to Keep Government Operating Until March 2013; Bill…

In this article, the authors describe the place of econometrics in undergraduate economics curricula in all American colleges and universities that offer economics majors as listed in the "U.S. News & World Report" "Best Colleges 2010" guide ("U.S. News & World Report" 2009). Data come from online catalogs, departmental Web sites, and online…

School policy regarding student failure of courses at the K-12 level generally focuses on grade retention or social promotion, neither of which addresses the students' needs. Grade retention has never been effective in helping students gain mastery of course objectives. To reduce the numbers of social promotions, many states require 8th graders to…

Improving high school graduation rates has become the focus of virtually every high school, district and state nationwide, as dropout rates in many areas remain unacceptably high. As 80-90% of students voice the expectation that they will go to college (and federal labor projections support the need for a more educated workforce), greater numbers…

This article raises questions about the breadth and depth of content-area expertise in initial licensure programs for art teachers, K-12. An analysis of some of the promises made in the name of art education suggests that art teachers need a high level of expertise and deep understanding of art in order to deliver on these promises. To consider…

Improving the mathematical skills of the next generation of students will require that elementary and middle school teachers are competent and confident in their abilities to perform fraction operations and to solve algebra equations The present study was conducted to (a) quantify relationships between prospective teachers' abilities to perform…

In this paper, we investigate whether and how mathematics factors into students' performance in IT learning. The involved cognitive levels of students learning mathematics and hence problem solving, are correlated to how well they are able to transpose their knowledge and apply it to problem solving in the IT field(s). Our hypothesis is that if…

For the last decade, the American Council on Education (ACE) has charted higher education's progress towards internationalization through its Mapping Internationalization on US Campuses project. Using surveys of US institutions conducted in 2001, 2006, and 2011, the Mapping study examines strategic planning, the curriculum, faculty policies and…

Using the data collected by the CCCC Committee on the Major, the authors demonstrate how quickly the writing major is growing, map the commonalities among various majors, discuss some of the problems in developing a major, and raise questions about what a writing major should be. (Contains 3 figures, 2 tables and 8 notes.)

This author investigated the present state of information systems (IS) master's programs in the United States. A total of 273 institutions were surveyed and 99 institutions were included in the final study population. The results show that 5 out of 8 master of science in information systems (MSIS) 2006 courses are required by less than 50% of…

Discussions have been carried out in recent years regarding the emergence of iSchools in the field of library and information science (LIS). One theme in the discussions centres on whether those iSchools, deriving from LIS programs, are indeed different from other non-iSchools of the field. To address this question, five iSchools and five…

This article describes an innovative collaboration between graduate students and a faculty member to co-design and co-teach a graduate-level workshop-style qualitative methods course. The goal of co-designing and co-teaching the course was to involve advanced graduate students in all aspects of designing a syllabus and leading class discussions in…

"The Vanishing West" traces the decline and near extinction of the Western Civilization history survey course in America's top colleges and universities from 1964 to 2010. This course, covering classical antiquity to the present, was once part of the undergraduate curriculum's intellectual bedrock, not only because it was often a graduation…

In the United States, undergraduates--regardless of their field of study--generally must complete a mathematics course to meet breadth-of-study requirements. This report is aimed at providing a research foundation for practical efforts to improve teaching and learning in such college mathematics service courses (e.g., college algebra, liberal arts…

In this article, the authors discuss a recent study they carried out at a mid-sized state university that used a polling method called deliberative polling. This type of polling differs from conventional polling in that respondents are polled before and after a deliberative session in which they discuss issues based on pertinent and…