Download or read book The Impact of Politics in Local Education written by Jane C. Owen and published by R & L Education. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, administrators must assume a different mindset if public schools are to remain viable and functional. Changing populations resulting in heterogeneous communities, diversity of community values, and finite resources meeting the infinite desires of a demanding constituency have created the necessity for political acumen on the part of local educational leaders. The primary reason for the upheaval occurring in schools today is not that the instructional element is being neglected, but that the building-level administrators have a woeful lack of proficiency in managing the politics that impact schools. This book gives administrators a better grasp of educational politics at the campus level as the school interacts with the community in which it is embedded. Through theory, application, and personal reflection, The Impact of Politics in Local Education will show administrators how to 'read' the political climate of a community, how to make meaning from the information, and how to proactively manage political issues so that a stable school environment can be maintained.
Download or read book Ten Thousand Democracies written by Michael B. Berkman and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-21 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essence of democracy is popular sovereignty. The people rule. In the United States, citizens exercise this right through elected officials who they believe will best represent their own values and interests. But are those interests and values always being followed? Authors Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer provide the first systematic examination of the extent to which the governments closest to the American public—its 10,000-plus local school boards—respond to the wishes of the majority. Ten Thousand Democracies begins with a look at educational reforms from the Progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the civil rights movement and ending with Pennsylvania's 2004 tax relief measure. Berkman and Plutzer explore what factors determine education spending levels in school districts, including the effects of public opinion, the nature of local political institutions, and the roles played by special interests. The authors show how board members are selected, how well the boards represent minorities, whether the public can bypass the board through referenda, and how the schools are financed. By providing an innovative statistical portrait that combines public opinion data with Census data for these school districts, the authors answer questions central to democratic control of our schools: how responsive are school boards to their public and when? How powerful are such special interests such as teachers' unions and senior citizens? By using the lens of America's public school districts to examine the workings of democracy, Ten Thousand Democracies offers new insight not only into the forces shaping local education policy but also how democratic institutions may function throughout all levels of government.
Download or read book Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1999-02-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spending on K-12 education across the United States and across local school districts has long been characterized by great disparitiesâ€"disparities that reflect differences in property wealth and tax rates. For more than a quarter-century, reformers have attempted to reduce these differences through court challenges and legislative action. As part of a broad study of education finance, the committee commissioned eight papers examining the history and consequences of school finance reform undertaken in the name of equity and adequacy. This thought-provoking, timely collection of papers explores such topics as: What do the terms "equity" and "adequacy" in school finance really mean? How are these terms relevant to the politics and litigation of school finance reform? What is the impact of court-ordered school finance reform on spending disparities? How do school districts use money from finance reform? What policy options are available to states facing new challenges from court decisions mandating adequacy in school finance? When measuring adequacy, how do you consider differences in student needs and regional costs?
Download or read book Governing American Schools written by Luther Harmon Zeigler and published by Brooks/Cole. This book was released on 1974 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Politics of Education written by Frank MacKinnon and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1960-12-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a strimulating, vigorous study of the public school system by an eminent Canadian political scientist and educator. Dr. Frank MacKinnon examines the roles of politicians, officials, trustees, and others who today wield the power in education, and discusses the effect of their administration on the schools, the teachers, and the curriculum. Dr. MacKinnon advocates strongly taking the politics out of education, and delegating more responsibility and freedom to the schools and to the teachers. Only by this means, he feels, can education become sufficiently effective in a democratic society and in a challenging and uncertain world. The kind of changes to the administration of schools and in the status and functions of teachers required to bring about improvement have long since been made, Dr MacKinnon holds, in other governmental activities and in other professions. The changes he recommends will, he suggests, provide better educational facilities for the country as a whole and better schooling for a larger number of children. Dr. MacKinnon has taught in both high school and university, and, as principal, he has administered every level from grade one to the second year of university including normal school. He has thus dealt with pupils of all ages and experienced a wide range of educational administration. He has served on many educational boards and committees. From this extensive background he draws many telling examples and anecdotes that will strike home. His comments and suggestions, made to provoke discussion and encourage improvement, will be of interest to members of provincial and municipal governments, school boards, administrators and teachers, and all citizens concerned about the education of young people. Although Dr. MacKinnon hits hard he does so not just to break down existing institutions, but because he has strong faith in the capacities of children and teachers. He covets for the latter a place of dignity and respect, and for the former an opportunity to develop individual character and initiative. He is, in fact, a believer in education
Download or read book Funding Public Schools written by Kenneth K. Wong and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the fundamental role of politics in funding our public schools and fills a conceptual imbalance in the current literature in school finance and educational policy. Unlike those who are primarily concerned about cost efficiency, Kenneth Wong specifies how resources are allocated for what purposes at different levels of the government. In contrast to those who focus on litigation as a way to reduce funding gaps, he underscores institutional stalemate and the lack of political will to act as important factors that affect legislative deadlock in school finance reform. Wong defines how politics has sustained various types of "rules" that affect the allocation of resources at the federal, state, and local level. While these rules have been remarkably stable over the past twenty to thirty years, they have often worked at cross-purposes by fragmenting policy and constraining the education process at schools with the greatest needs. Wong's examination is shaped by several questions. How do these rules come about? What role does politics play in retention of the rules? Do the federal, state, and local governments espouse different policies? In what ways do these policies operate at cross-purposes? How do they affect educational opportunities? Do the policies cohere in ways that promote better and more equitable student outcomes? Wong concludes that the five types of entrenched rules for resource allocation are rooted in existing governance arrangements and seemingly impervious to partisan shifts, interest group pressures, and constitutional challenge. And because these rules foster policy fragmentation and embody initiatives out of step with the performance-based reform agenda of the 1990s, the outlook for positive change in public education is uncertain unless fairly radical approaches are employed. Wong also analyzes four allocative reform models, two based on the assumption that existing political structures are unlikely to change and two that seek to empower actors at the school level. The two models for systemwide restructuring, aimed at intergovernmental coordination and/or integrated governance, would seek to clarify responsibilities for public education among federal, state, and local authorities-above all, integrating political and educational accountability. The other two models identified by Wong shift control from state and district to the school, one based on local leadership and the other based on market forces. In discussing the guiding principles of the four models, Wong takes care to identify both the potential and limitations of each. Written with a broad policy audience in mind, Wong's book should appeal to professionals interested in the politics of educational reform and to teachers of courses dealing with educational policy and administration and intergovernmental relations.
Download or read book Besieged written by William G. Howell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: School boards are fighting for their survival. Almost everything that they do is subject to regulations handed down from city councils, state boards of education, legislatures, and courts. As recent mayoral and state takeovers in such cities as Baltimore, Chicago, and New York make abundantly clear, school boards that do not fulfill the expectations of other political players may be stripped of what few independent powers they still retain. Teachers unions exert growing influence over board decision-making processes. And with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government has aggressively inserted itself into matters of local education governance. B esieged is the first full-length volume in many years to systematically examine the politics that surround school boards. A group of highly renowned scholars, relying on both careful case studies and quantitative analyses, examine how school boards fare when they interact with their political superiors, teachers unions, and the public. For the most part, the picture that emerges is sobering: while school boards perform certain administrative functions quite well, the political pressures they face undermine their capacity to institute the wide-ranging school reforms that many voters and local leaders are currently demanding.
Download or read book State and Local Politics written by David B. Magleby and published by Longman Publishing Group. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most authoritative text for state and local politics. "State and Local Politics: Government by the People "continually sets the standards for other state and local politics texts by anticipating instructors' and students' needs. Known for its esteemed author team who treat each new edition as a fresh challenge, "State and Local Politics: Government by the People" is the perfect text for the educator who wants students to understand how America's state and local political systems work.
Download or read book Educational Authorities and the Schools written by Helene Ärlestig and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes and analyses the organisation, functions and development of national educational authorities and agencies and the influence they have on local schools in 20 countries around the world. It examines the governing chain in the respective countries from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. It does so against the background of the stability and rigour of the governing chains having been challenged, with some researchers considering the chain to be broken. However, the view that comes to the fore in this book is that the chain is still present and contains both vertical implementation structures and intervening spaces for policy interpretation. How schools become successful is important for the individual students as well as the local community and the national state. A vast quantity of research has looked at what happens in schools and classrooms. At the same time, national governance and politics as well as local prerequisites are known to exert influence on schools and their results to a high degree. Societal priorities, problems and traditions provide variety in how governance is executed. This book provides an international overview of the similarities and differences between educational agencies and how their work influences schools.
Download or read book Calling a Snow Day written by Richard D. Tomko and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educational administrators are faced with making decisions daily that affect the operations of their district, building, or organization. Nearly all these decisions are based on the needs and influence of local stakeholders and constituent groups. Calling a Snow Day: How Local Politics Influence School Decisions is a tool to help leaders in education identify, understand, and maneuver around all obstacles that would influence decisions based on the needs of the constituent and stakeholder group and not just the system as a whole. These decisions, which impact the stakeholders of an educational system, can be influenced by a political landscape that can be both beneficial and detrimental to the progress that the administrator is looking to make in consideration of their tenure in the district.
Download or read book Homeschooling the Right written by Heath Brown and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For four decades, the number of conservative parents who homeschool their children has risen. But unlike others who teach at home, conservative homeschool families and organizations have amassed an army of living-room educators ready to defend their right to instruct their children as they wish, free from government intrusion. Through intensive but often hidden organizing, homeschoolers have struck fear into state legislators, laying the foundations for Republican electoral success. In Homeschooling the Right, the political scientist Heath Brown provides a novel analysis of the homeschooling movement and its central role in conservative efforts to shrink the public sector. He traces the aftereffects of the passage of state homeschool policies in the 1980s and the results of ongoing conservative education activism on the broader political landscape, including the campaigns of George W. Bush and the rise of the Tea Party. Brown finds that by opting out of public education services in favor of at-home provision, homeschoolers have furthered conservative goals of reducing the size and influence of government. He applies the theory of policy feedback—how public-policy choices determine subsequent politics—to demonstrate the effects of educational activism for other conservative goals such as gun rights, which are similarly framed as matters of liberty and freedom. Drawing on decades of county data, dozens of original interviews, and original archives of formal and informal homeschool organizations, this book is a groundbreaking investigation of the politics of the conservative homeschooling movement.
Download or read book Teachers versus the Public written by Paul E. Peterson and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive exploration of 21st Century school politics, Teachers versus the Public offers the first comparison of the education policy views of both teachers and the public as a whole, and reveals a deep, broad divide between the opinions held by citizens and those who teach in the public schools. Among the findings: • Divisions between teachers and the public are wider and deeper than differences between other groups often thought to contest school policy, such as Republicans and Democrats, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, or African Americans and whites. • The teacher-public gap is widest on such issues as merit pay, teacher tenure reform, impact of teacher unions, school vouchers, charter schools, and requirements to test students annually. • Public support for school vouchers for all students, charter schools, and parent trigger laws increases sharply when people are informed of the national ranking of student performance in their local school district. • Public willingness to give local schools high marks, its readiness to support higher spending levels, and its support for teacher unions all decline when the public learns the national ranking of their local schools. • On most issues, teacher opinion does not change in response to new information nearly as much as it does for the public as a whole. In fact, the gap between what teachers and the public think about school reform grows even wider when both teachers and the public are given more information about current school performance, current expenditure levels, and current teacher pay. The book provides the first experimental study of public and teacher opinion. Using a recently developed research strategy, the authors ask differently worded questions about the same topic to randomly chosen segments of representative groups of citizens. This approach allows them to identify the impact on public opinion of new information on issues such as
Download or read book Making Politics Work for Development written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.
Download or read book The Politics of Education written by Laurence Iannaccone and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Examination of Institutional Restructuring and Regime Change in Local Education Politics written by Chelsea Lynn Haring and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Balancing Local Control and State Responsibility for K 12 Education written by Neil D. Theobald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the impact of state activism on local school autonomy in terms of both financial resources and policy initiatives.
Download or read book Mayors in the Middle written by Jeffrey R. Henig and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desperate to jump-start the reform process in America's urban schools, politicians, scholars, and school advocates are looking increasingly to mayors for leadership. But does a stronger mayoral role represent bold institutional change with real potential to improve big-city schools, or just the latest in the copycat world of school reform du jour? Is it democratic? Why have efforts to put mayors in charge so often generated resistance along racial dividing lines? Public debate and scholarly analysis have shied away from confronting such issues head-on. Mayors in the Middle brings together, for students of education policy and urban politics as well as scholars and school advocates, the most thoughtful and original analyses of the promise and limitations of mayoral takeovers of schools. Reflecting on the experience of six cities--Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C.--ten of the nation's leading experts on education politics tackle the question of whether putting mayors in charge is a step in the right direction. Through the case studies and the wide-ranging essays that follow and build upon them, the contributors--Stefanie Chambers, Jeffrey R. Henig, Kenneth J. Meier, Jeffrey Mirel, Marion Orr, John Portz, Wilbur C. Rich, Dorothy Shipps, and Clarence N. Stone--begin the process of answering questions critical to the future of inner-city children, the prospects for urban revitalization, and the shape of American education in the years to come.
