The political momentum behind state-level preschool programs is tremendous, but existing proposals are often flawed and expensive. Preschool can provide small but statistically significant short-term gains for low-income children; however, these gains usually fade quickly in later grades. There is little evidence to support the belief that…

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan signaled last week that the Department of Education is poised to launch reauthorization efforts for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. He used a meeting of high-level education stakeholders to underline his likely priorities for reauthorization of the law. The new version of the law, he said, will…

This article presents the author's response to Henry Giroux's "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex." Henry Giroux has written a provocative assessment of the contemporary challenges facing the United States as a society, which over the course of the 20th century had assumed the role of leader and exemplar…

The political arena, where historically women in the United States have been under-represented, provides an important laboratory for examining leadership and gender via the candidacy of now Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton, who in 2008 was the first woman to run competitively for the Democratic presidential nomination. This study sought to…

Early years policy increasingly uses the concept of "citizenship" in relation to children in Australia and worldwide. This concept is used as a taken-for-granted idea; however, there is no singularly agreed-upon answer to the question of what "citizenship" means when used in relation to children, and what practical…

Notwithstanding political science professors' concerted efforts to remain politically neutral in the classroom, we find evidence that students are able to successfully identify the partisan loyalties of their professors. Furthermore, we find that there is a tendency for students to drift toward the Democratic Party over the course of the semester,…

Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science George Lakoff is among the handful of current faculty members in the United States to have successfully recast himself as a significant figure in national politics. Though his views place rather far on the progressive left, he has, unlike some other scholar-activists, focused most of his…

Nothing says "the sixties" like the word "revision," and, in keeping with those times, the fledgling feminist art movement dismissed hard-won mastery as "mere skill" and snubbed the canon of Western art as evidence of male dominion over the criteria for legitimacy and achievement. In debunking the myth of the Great (male) Artist, the women's…

This article presents a personal history of the author's own relationships with the concept of academic freedom. The article is subdivided into 3 prehistories, 7 incidents, 3 disjunctions, and 3 myths. The author discusses the complications of politics, culture, and academic freedom in one career.

With more than four decades of experience in both urban and suburban districts, Superintendent Gerald Kohn knows how difficult it can be to change the culture of a school district beset by poverty, social issues and politics. Yet he accepted the challenge of bringing change to the Harrisburg School District in central Pennsylvania eight years ago.…

It is hard to predict exactly how academe should respond to the most serious economic crisis since the 1930s. In this article, the author suggests the possibility of assessing some possible options by looking at how higher education fared during the Great Depression. After all, despite its enormous growth since World War II, academe's…

Indian universities had not historically done much to recruit foreign students, or to help the few that they had adjust to life in India. But in recent years, that has begun to change--if slowly. A handful of Indian institutions are making an effort to welcome international students to their campuses. And the government of Prime Minister Manmohan…

Among the most important features of a democratic way of life is public space within which we collectively make meaning of our work and lives together and take shared responsibility for past action and future intentions. This article looks briefly at the argument for democratic public space within political and educational theory before focusing…

Islam has become an increasingly important topic in American society and education. This article will explore the rationale for teaching about religion in public schools, the role of Islam and Muslims in a multicultural society, and discuss numerous ways in which Islam can be incorporated into multicultural secondary school curricula.

If college writing faculty wish to prepare students to engage in civic forums, then how might we prepare students to write and speak amid racial politics on our campuses? This article explores the college student discourse that shaped an interracial conflict at a public California university in 2002 and questions the "rhetoric of injury"…