Few educational problems have received more attention than has the failure to ensure that the nation's classrooms are staffed by qualified teachers. Many states have pushed for more-rigorous preservice teacher education, training, and certification standards. Moreover, a host of recruitment initiatives have attempted to increase the supply of…

As a heritage from the Soviet period (1945-1991) about 500,000-700,000 (mostly Russophone) persons (military persons, workers and others) lived in Latvia with little or no command of Latvian. During the same period, the Russian language had replaced Latvian in the public administration. Following the restitution of independence in 1991, one of the…

In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act. In addition to providing additional funding for schools and encouraging local autonomy, the new law focuses on accountability in an attempt to close the achievement gap for all students, leaving no child behind. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of Bush's new law is the…

The Maryland Gun Violence Act, enacted into law in 1996, explicitly authorized courts to order batterers to surrender their firearms through civil protective orders. It also vested law enforcement with the explicit authority to remove guns when responding to a domestic violence complaint. In order to assess how these laws were implemented, we…

This study focuses on music education for children and adolescents offered by music and arts schools receiving public financial support (from the municipality or the state) and that are "independent" of the comprehensive and secondary school. For these purposes, then, "extra-curricular" music education will be understood as…

Copyright law, together with the market logic it carries, penetrates deeply into our daily life. The copyright regime is so restrictive that it turns a normal learning process into a series of potential copyright violations. The Free Software Movement (FSM) represents a substantial community effort to counter this trend. It seeks to supersede the…

With the performance of students, teachers, and schools defining success under current standards-based accountability policies (e.g. Chicago Public Schools (Note 1); "No Child Left Behind Act," (United States Department of Education, 2002)), school districts are implementing various forms of intervention programs as a means to improve…

Much attention has been given to the problem of sexual predators and the struggles of the legal-justice system to contain them. In response to public outcry over high-profile sex crimes, federal and state legislators have responded in the past decade with innovative but controversial public policy initiatives, called "sexually violent predator…

A din of opprobrium rises from the academy against for-profit education. But a name like "The University of Phoenix" is not misleading to students, Richard P. Hassler argues, even though the dividends that that large public corporation pays its shareholders derive narrowly from career preparation, rather than from more rarefied…

This monograph seeks, through a synthesis of existing literature, to understand better how external forces operating through an enterprise on the academic margins can lead institutions and their leaders to make decisions that appear to many observers to make little sense relative to the institution's mission. Through the athletics enterprise, the…

Traditionally, students with disabilities have been denied a voice in where or how they should receive their education. Much of the literature about education for adolescents focused on both non-disabled students' and teachers' perceptions of working with students with disabilities. Although there is limited research that examines the perceptions…

Adolescent parents and their children are both at critical points in their lives, when their life courses can be shaped toward healthy development, stability, and productivity, or toward life-long poverty and dependency. Efforts to improve outcomes for these young families must take advantage of every opportunity to connect them with the services…

The People's Republic of China has employed two means of literacy promotion: a campaign approach and a legislative approach to meet the needs of nation-state building through education. From 1949 through to the late 1970s, the campaign approach was motivated by a political rationale, but later an economic rationale also became important. From the…

Charter schools are seen as an attractive enrollment option to parents with special education students, yet there are concerns over the way special education is implemented in charter schools and the access they grant and provide to students with special needs. This study examines the condition of for-profit and non-profit charter schools in…

The establishment of Maui Arts & Cultural Center (MACC), a community arts facility that prioritizes education at the top of its mission, has been a significant factor in the growth of arts education in Hawai'i. This article describes the role such a facility can play in the kind of educational reform that people envision, and the author's…