Education Commons^™

Liberating Children, Or Breaking The Backbone Of Our Democracy? A Book Review Of Hostages No More: The Fight For Education Freedom And The Future Of The American Child, Jeffrey Frenkiewich

Democracy and Education

In Hostages No More, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos provides a 10-chapter memoir in which she argues for school privatization, including the expansion of government funding of charter schools. DeVos argues that the modern public education system, supported by an “establishment” of government bureaucracies, the education industrial complex, and teacher unions, holds American children, especially poor Black and Hispanic children, “hostage” (DeVos, 2022, p. 261) and that her life’s work has been a civil rights struggle to help parents and their children obtain their “education freedom” (p. 216). However, many of her claims are supported with misleading information, and …

Negating Amy Gutmann: Deliberative Democracy, Business Influence, And Segmentation Strategies In Education, Brian Ford

Democracy and Education

The task of creating a public will is daunting in any political system, but a democracy dedicated to the principles of participation and public deliberation faces specific challenges, including overcoming organized opposition that may not accept democratic tenets. In the sphere of education (and social reproduction more generally), business-influenced movements to reform public education question many of the established goals and norms of democratic education and thus may be the vanguard of such opposition. In order to interpret and explore these movements, this article enlists Amy Gutmann's work as a heuristic device. In so doing, it looks at the task …

Education And Job Match: Revisited, Saagar Dulani, Hannah Baney, Hoang Nguyen, Yifei Yan

Undergraduate Economic Review

To study the changes in the effect of degree field on mismatch and the change in the effect of mismatch of wages over time, we revisit a study by Robst (2006) who found that workers who are mismatched earn less than adequately match workers with the same amount schooling. Using recent data from 2015 National Survey of College Graduate (NSCG), we also find a negative relationship between the case of mismatch and the outcome of workers in term of wages, even though the degree of mismatch doesn’t seem to matter as much.

Race, Residential Segregation, And The Death Of Democracy: Education And Myth Of Postracialism, Lori Latrice Martin, Kenneth J. Varner

Democracy and Education

Since the 1930s, federal housing policies and individual practices increased the spatial separation of whites and blacks. Practices such as redlining, restrictive covenants, and discrimination in the rental and sale of housing not only led to residential segregation by race but also continue to shape Whiteness and frame narratives about what constitutes Blackness. Despite the judicial and legislative victories of the civil rights movement, including the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, residential segregation persists and in …

Modelling Public-Education Spending Vs. Allocation As Independent Factors Of Educational Outcomes, Kevin Tasley

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper explores and expands upon the work of Hanushek and Wößmann (2007) whose accumulated findings propose increased educational spending provides only marginal returns in terms of student’s cognitive outcomes. This study constructs an OLS regression model to explore the significance of U.S. state education spending and financial allocations as independent factors of state-level average ACT scores over a 10-year time series. The model additionally accounts for self-selection and socio-economic status. The results of this study support Hanushek and Wößmann’s conclusions while also demonstrating evidence that shifts in allocations towards instructional spending, as opposed to increasing total expenditures, could have …

Claremont I And Ii - Were They Rightly Decided, And Where Have They Left Us?, John M. Lewis, Stephen E. Borofsky

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “Our children embody the enduring wonder of life. They hold our hopes for the future. We want them to be happy, to succeed in whatever they do both in work and in play. We want them to contribute to our country and the world in constructive ways.

But for these hopes to be realized our children must be educated-they must possess the requisite skills and knowledge to function well in this ever changing world. Yet, are we, as a society, meeting our responsibility to educate our children? What do we expect of our public schools? How important are these …

Education And Educational Attainment In Southern Nevada, Jennifer Pharr, Courtney Coughenour, Shawn Gerstenberger

Nevada Journal of Public Health

Failure to complete high school has a direct impact on a person’s earning potential and quality of life. Higher levels of education are associated with better health. Because of this association, it is important for children and adults to have access to quality education. The percentage of adults who have successfully pursued higher education in Southern Nevada is lower than the peer Mountain West metropolitan areas and the national average. Nevada high school graduation rates are the lowest in the nation. High school graduation rates and dropout rates vary by race/ethnicity in the Clark County School District. High school graduation …

Chile’S Educational Reform: The Struggle Between Nationalization And Privatization, Vannia J. Zelaya

Pepperdine Policy Review

This paper looks into Chile's educational system and the recent policy reforms that President Michelle Bachelet seeks to establish. More specifically, this paper explores the "Proyecto de Ley de Fin al Lucro, la Selección y el Copago," which aims to eliminate private for-profit institutions within the public system, admission selectivity, and mandatory copay fees. With this, Bachelet's administration along with Chile's Ministry of Education intend to end the inequality of access to education, which is part of Chile's broader problem of great socioeconomic inequality. This particular policy is part of Bachelet's comprehensive educational system reform, and it brings Chile's voucher …

Educational Fiscal Policy And Its Effects On How Our Children Learn: Comparing Minnesota And Illinois, Sally Anne Stenzel

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The study compares Illinois’ and Minnesota’s education fiscal policies. Illinois funds it’s education system mainly from the local level, whereas Minnesota funds it’s mainly from the state level. Thus, in Illinois, if there are discrepancies between household incomes in wealthier and poorer areas, the schools in wealthier areas would receive more money than those in poorer areas. Test scores are then compared. Illinois typically has lower scores than Minnesota. The conclusion is that Illinois’ policies are hindering their students’ learning, compared to Minnesota students, with some mixed results.

A Few Drops Of Oil Will Not Be Enough, Stephen James

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn provide a rich description of the various kinds of violence, deprivation, depredation and exploitation that women experience on a vast scale in the developing world. They write of sex trafficking, acid attacks, “bride burning,” enslavement, spousal beatings, unequal healthcare (something the USA still struggles with), insufficient food, gendered abortions and infant and maternal mortality. They are right to identify the education of women and girls as part of the solution to the widespread “gendercide.” However, their approach focuses too much on the capacity, indeed the virtue or heroism, of individual women. It does not take …

"The Female Entrepreneur"?, Cath Collins

Human Rights & Human Welfare

I read the “Women’s Crusade” article that forms the centrepiece of this month’s roundtable with initial interest, gradually turning to a vague sense of disquiet spiced with occasional disbelief. After a few more readings, I tried highlighting the passages that bothered me and stringing them together. Countries “riven by fundamentalism”— that’s presumably the Islamic variety, rather than the Christian variant which holds such sway in the US. The suggestion that “everyone from the World Bank to the US [...] Chiefs of Staff to [...] CARE” now thinks that women are the answer to global extremism hides too many questionable assumptions …

New Teachers And Old Pay Structures: An Analysis Of How Teacher Pay Influences Job Acceptance Of First-Year Teachers, Chance W. Lewis

Essays in Education

This study identified whether compensation packages were a factor in first-year teacher’s decisions to accept a teaching position in the states of Colorado and Louisiana. This study involved (a) identifying the components of a school district’s compensation package that were factors in the job acceptance decisions as indicated by respondents and (b) indicating other factors besides compensation that played a major role in job acceptance decisions.

The study surveyed a sample of 12 school districts in Colorado and Louisiana during the 2000-2001 academic school year. It included first-year teachers in the 12 approved school districts that had no previous teaching …