The demise of Soviet genetics in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s has stood for many as a prime example of the damage that social and political dogmatism can do when allowed to meddle in the workings of science. In particular, the story of Trofim Lysenko's rise to preeminence and the fall of Mendelian genetics in the Soviet Union has become a lasting…

This article critically examines the Labour Party's policies for local school systems, focusing on its proposals for regional Directors of School Standards, for academies and free schools, and for local democracy, and offers an alternative approach.

This research presents findings of the policymaking environment in the area of postsecondary education benefits for undocumented immigrants in New York. In addition to describing the response to ever-changing federal, state, and local actions, this investigation also identifies five political forces (power of the governor, pressure of advocacy…

Rural school districts play an important part in the national educational landscape. Not only do they provide nearly one in four U.S. children with many skills, including those needed to enter college, but they also act as an economic stabilization force for the communities that they serve. Superintendents of rural school districts, as the leaders…

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so "drenched in the past," the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt…

Caught between extraordinary public expectations and relatively modest constitutional authority, U.S. presidents historically have fashioned all sorts of mechanisms--executive orders, proclamations, memoranda--by which to move their objectives forward. William Howell asserts that under President Barack Obama's administration, presidential…

This article examines the nature of an on-going educational partnership between a Higher Education institution and a number of Further Education (FE) colleges in the West Midlands region of England, forged against the backdrop of sectoral marketisation and neoliberal reform. The partnership originates in the organisation and administration of…

The purpose of this study is to analyze how China has strived to develop its world-class research universities and what are distinguishing characteristics of China's efforts to form these universities for the last decades. This study begins with a review of literature and research questions. It then touches on the background and rationale of…

This article argues that in divided societies, civic education fails to fulfill one of its most important social role: creating a more inclusive society that allows a democratic dialogue to flow across different ideological, religious, and cultural communities. This failure is grounded in two main reasons. First, civics teachers are socially and…

Locating post-16 professionalism explores the ways in which teachers in the UK and the USA engaged in digitally mediated communication incidentally narrate their professional selves during extended exchanges about the process of post-qualification registration. Drawing on a theoretical framework derived from participatory democracy, the study is…

The argument of this article is that the recent writing of Jurgen Habermas concerning the boundary of public reason offers the following advantages over the classic "liberal proviso": (1) It releases religious citizens from an undue cognitive burden; (2) It distributes the cognitive burden of justification symmetrically across the citizenry; and…

"Empathy" is a much-discussed term in the humanities these days. While some critics value it and argue that literature desirably promotes it, other critics worry that appeals to this emotion will neglect important matters of social context. In the literature classroom, the best approach is to take time to consider how texts complicate the impulse…

Rousseau's political philosophy presents the great legislator as a civic educator who must over time transform naturally self-loving egoists into citizens animated by a general will without destroying freedom. This is an educational process which is "denaturing" but which aims to produce autonomous adults who can ultimately say to their teacher…

This article offers a broad philosophical and historical background to the dyad of social exclusion/inclusion by examining the analytics and politics of exclusion first by reference to Michel Foucault who studies the modern history of exclusion and makes it central to his approach in understanding the development of modern institutions of emerging…

Analyses of society during the Soviet period need to include an understanding of the construction of everyday life by ordinary people, as well as of the policies and behavior of political leaders and of the formal structure of Soviet institutions. The usefulness of this approach can be seen by looking at data on how students in the 1970s…