Education Commons^™

Implementing Retrenchment Strategies: A Comparison Of State Governments And Public Higher Education, Marvin Druker, Betty Robinson

New England Journal of Public Policy

The authors present a comparative analysis of the processes and strategies by which public organizations implement retrenchment in the face of continued budget shortfalls. The focus is on the governments of the fifty United States and public institutions of higher education in the nine states of the Northeast. Special consideration is given to the programs that have been tried, sources of ideas for the strategies adopted, and constraints that institutions face when dealing with financial crises. While similarities were found for state governments and colleges and universities in use of past strategies and short-term fixes, differences were found in the …

Leadership In Higher Education: A Changing Paradigm, Allen L. Sessoms

Trotter Review

Senior administrators at public colleges and universities have previously been in the enviable position of managing reasonably stable institutions that have enjoyed an essential place in society. These institutions were born of society's desire to ensure access to the fruits of learning by a broad spectrum of citizens and to ensure that the knowledge developed was put at the service of industry and of the nation. In the past, and particularly after World War II, public institutions of higher education enjoyed explosive growth in both the numbers of students and in terms of public support. In addition, after the launch …

Retaining Students Of Color: The Office Of Ahana Student Programs At Boston College, Donald Brown

Trotter Review

On September 1, 1978, I assumed responsibility for what was then known as the Office of Minority Student Programs at Boston College. The charge given to me was to alter an embarrassingly high attrition rate of 83 percent for a target group of black and Latino students who had been identified by the university's Admissions Office as having high levels of motivation and potential, but who would require assistance if they were to succeed at the university.

Over the course of the past sixteen years, a great deal has transpired at Boston College. An important change was made in the …

An Interview With Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, Director Of The Center For Strategic Urban Community Leadership, Rutgers University, Harold Horton

Trotter Review

This article is an interview with Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, who was the Director of the Center for Strategic Urban Community Leadership at Rutgers University at the time.

Educational Opportunity Programs For Students Of Color In Graduate And Professional Schools, Sheila Gregory, Harold Horton

Trotter Review

The significant underrepresentation of people of color in all occupational fields is clearly indicative of the exceptionally low percent of people of color in graduate and professional schools in America. Unless drastic actions are taken by universities across the nation to identify and recruit a significant number of students of color in undergraduate colleges it is unlikely that significant numbers of people of color will be available in the near future for potential employment.

Expanding The Pool Of Women And Minority Students Pursuing Graduate Study: The Development Of A National Model, Bernard W. Harleston

Trotter Review

The underrepresentation of women and minority students in certain disciplines in the graduate schools of American colleges and universities is a matter of great national concern. This concern has been intensified by the decline during the last fifteen years, especially from 1978 to 1988, in graduate school enrollments of all categories of American students. But, even before this most recent period of decline and during a time when the enrollment of women and minority students was at its highest (between 1968 and 1974, as a consequence, primarily, of the civil rights movement), the representation of women and minorities in the …

Better High Schools: What Would Create Them?, Theodore R. Sizer

New England Journal of Public Policy

The American desire to improve education has set off a flurry of activity to reform schools. In such a climate of restructuring, Sizer explores what better secondary schools might "look like" if indeed they existed. His consideration of the improved high school is based on five particular conditions — all of which support teachers and students in their engagement with the serious stuff of learning and all of which must exist in one form or another for schools to be effective. The conditions are cast as questions. Sizer locates the responsibility for school reform broadly, from the heart of a …

Parent Involvement In Urban Schools: The View From The Front Of The Classroom, Frances Gamer, Kathleen Mccarthy Mastaby

New England Journal of Public Policy

American educational reform movements focus on efforts to restructure our schools to include all interested parties, especially parents, in the decision-making process. Nowhere is involvement more crucial than in America's inner-city urban neighborhoods. As parents are given a greater voice in their child's school, educators must join them as collaborators. This article identifies elements that impeded parental involvement and recognizes positive and encouraging techniques leading toward successful family-school-community partnerships. An alliance between groups too long seen as opponents rather than proponents must be established.

The Impact Of School Spending On Student Achievement: Results Of Meap Statewide Tests, Robert D. Gaudet

New England Journal of Public Policy

Examining school spending and student achievement as measured by the Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program tests on a community-by-community basis indicates that high spending in and of itself does not ensure achievement. While every community must have adequate funding to deliver an acceptable level of education services, there is a wide variation in achievement in similar communities with similar spending. The data suggest that other factors influence outcomes at least as much as spending.

Violence Prevention In The Schools, Deborah B. Prothrow-Stith

New England Journal of Public Policy

Violence and its consequent injury and death represent a major health problem in this country. The United States has one of the highest homicide rates in the industrialized world: ten times higher than that of England and twenty times higher than that of Spain. Fatalities from violence represent only the tip of the iceberg: nonfatal intentional injuries occur as many as one hundred times more frequently: assault and intentional injuries identified in medical studies can be four times those reported to the police, suggesting that medical institutions are a primary site for identification of individuals with violence-related problems. Violence and …

The Suffolk County Sheriff's Department: Correctional Education Program, Robert C. Rufo, Stefan F. Lobuglio

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article describes the Sheriff's Department correctional education programs at the Suffolk County House of Correction and Jail. It points out the tremendous need for educational services given that more than 60 percent of those incarcerated in these institutions are high school drop-outs, and a much higher percentage are functionally illiterate. Because 95 percent of those incarcerated at this facility will return to their communities within three years, educating prisoners serves as a constructive and cost-effective means of preventing recidivism and an effective investment in public safety. The authors also discusses the new Mandatory Literacy Law, which essentially links literacy …

New Directions In Juvenile Justice: School-Based Crime Prevention, Paul F. Walsh Jr.

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article considers the role of the district attorney as a catalyst for aggressive school-based educational programs to help young people avoid trouble with the legal system. Walsh argues that while it may be unfair to burden classroom teachers with additional responsibilities concerning drug and alcohol issues, school is the logical site at which to provide these services and that a district attorney is well suited to act as a catalyst and resource for providing these additional services.

Naep State Reports In Mathematics: Valuable Information For Monitoring Education Reform, Ronald K. Hambleton, Sharon F. Cadman

New England Journal of Public Policy

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a congressionally mandated program, can provide valuable data to educational policymakers in Massachusetts and other New England states about the status of their educational reform initiatives and their performance standards. The three purposes of this article are to describe NAEP and its goals and structure, to present some of the results of the 1992 Mathematics NAEP Assessment as an example of the utility of this national assessment program, and to highlight ways in which background data collected by NAEP can be helpful in interpreting assessment results and monitoring educational reform. The six New …

Why Is Boston University Still In Chelsea?, Glenn Jacobs

New England Journal of Public Policy

In the face of obdurate social, educational, and political failures, problems, and obstacles, Boston University persists in its management of the Chelsea public schools. It also persists in its refusal to share power with such Chelsea citizenry as the resistant Latinos whose leadership the university seeks to discredit. Jacobs examines the historical background of the city and its schools to decipher Chelsea's economic dependency and repeated fall into receivership and privatization.

Notes On Higher Education In The 1990s, Zelda F. Gamson

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article consists of a series of essays written for The Academic Workplace, the newsletter of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education, since 1990. The backdrop for the essays is the increasing inequality in higher education caused by changes in the political economy of higher education, especially in New England. The first essay analyzes the roots of contemporary faculty dissatisfaction with their work lives by tracing the impacts of the expansion of higher education, changes in the student body, and greater government involvement in higher education. Subsequent essays discuss multicultural education, faculty shortages, political correctness, responses to …

A Thoughtful Approach To Public Education Reform, John C. Rennie

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article restates the underlying rationale for the importance of high-quality K-12 public education. The author describes some of the difficulties reformers encounter in engendering support for and determining the most cogent elements of reform. The differences between the aims and capabilities of school-business partnerships, which essentially assist the current system, and systemic reform, which aims to change the system, led to the formation of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. Rennie summarizes the process followed by MBAE in developing a framework for reform and meeting its objectives.

Education And Falling Wages, Lester C. Thurow

New England Journal of Public Policy

Start with a statistic that should be burned into the brain of every American. If one looks at young males eighteen to twenty-five years of age who work full-time for a full year — eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year — 18 percent of them could not earn a poverty-line income ($12,183 in 1990 dollars) in 1980. Ten years later, in 1990, that number had risen to 40 percent. Among young female workers eighteen to twenty-four years of age, the percentage unable to earn a poverty-line income despite full-time, full-year work rises from 29 …

Connecting Productive Schools And Workplaces For A Knowledge Society, Byrd L. Jones, Robert W. Maloy

New England Journal of Public Policy

As American education struggles to achieve new competencies for an emerging information age, popular reforms remain locked in industrial-era metaphors. Testing for basic skills, teacher professionalism, and school-business collaboration assumes that schooling prepares workers with skills for predictable roles. Meanwhile, computers and related technologies make possible low-cost information that is transforming learning and jobs. Hierarchical organizational structures that subordinated most employees have given way to flatter, flexible teams. Quasi-autonomous decision making by knowledgeable professionals extends to more and more workers. When businesses simply offer schools a few extra resources, they stunt interactive partnerships that enable youth and business cultures to …

The School Improvement Industry: A Case Study Of Framingham, Abigail Jurist Levy

New England Journal of Public Policy

This study looked at school improvement in the Framingham public schools from three perspectives. We were interested in finding out if the administration and school committee, local businesses with an interest in education, and agencies that provide training and technical assistance to schools have similar ideas regarding how the Framingham schools should improve. We conducted interviews with administrators and members of the school committee, local businesses and businesses involved in school/business partnerships, and six agencies that provide training and technical support to schools in the Greater Boston area. We found that although all groups shared many interests, the businesses and …

Affirmative Action Strategies In Elementary And Secondary Schools, Abigail Therstrom

New England Journal of Public Policy

Disproportionate numbers of black students do poorly on standardized tests; strategies to improve American education thus frequently target inner-city schools. These strategies often have an unrecognized affirmative action component. A search for more minority students or teachers is clearly an affirmative action effort. But the elimination of all tracking or competency grouping is another matter. Normally viewed as nothing more than a pedagogical strategy, it, like other affirmative action efforts, amounts to a conscious effort to alter the low-track status of minority pupils. Similarly, the demand for curricular reforms, racial sensitivity training, and more culturally "appropriate" tests, while not obviously …

Inclusion: Educating Students With And Without Disabilities, Bill Henderson

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article presents an overview of inclusion, a practice that is being utilized increasingly in schools across the country. In inclusive schools, students who have disabilities learn together with their nondisabled peers. Teachers and support staff collaborate to serve all students in integrated classes. After reviewing the social and legal background of inclusion, Henderson describes specific strategies for designing and implementing successful programs. He outlines organizational change, curriculum and instruction modification, and school culture transformation.

What's Wrong With Reform?, James H. Case

New England Journal of Public Policy

The conservative educational reform movement, which still, after more than a decade, is the dominant force in school reform, has had little success in improving schools because it is based on invalid and self-defeating theoretical assumptions. Taken together, these assumptions have the effect of substituting nostalgia — a longing for the schools the reformers themselves attended —for policy and for increasing standardization at the expense of individual growth and development. The reformers (Bloom, Hirsch, Ravitch, Finn, Bennett, et al.) have particular difficulty, given their assumptions, in dealing both with individual differences among students and with ethnic and racial differences among …

Follies: Education Reform And The Promise Of Technology, Nicholas Paleologos

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article offers an overview of forty years of American education and suggests why technology may save us from ourselves.

The Misplaced Burden: Art Education As Social Healer, Carol Cruickshanks

New England Journal of Public Policy

Social transformation is one of the potential benefits of art education, but not its sole responsibility. Why, then, in an effort to ensure adequate funding, are many art educators forced to emphasize this aspect of art education above its intrinsic power to help shape individuals? An art educator examines the historical roots of the imbalance between current educational policy and the practice of public art education.

Service Learning: The Promise And The Risk, Alice L. Halsted, Joan C. Schine

New England Journal of Public Policy

Service learning, the pairing of meaningful work in the community and structured reflection, has the potential to transform schools. It provides opportunities for young people to test new roles, develop skills, apply academic learning in a "real world" setting, and move toward responsible citizenship. Service learning can reinvigorate traditional classrooms and turn passive students into dynamic and engaged learners. However, unless it is implemented with care, with a solid rationale and clearly articulated learning and service goals, service learning will fail to realize this potential. The power and the promise of service learning are too great to allow this imaginative …

Key Issues Facing The Boston Public Schools, Robert A. Dentler

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is the third examination of the six issues the author identified in "Some Key Issues Facing Boston's Public Schools in 1984," following the November 1983 election of the first thirteen-member Boston School Committee. He revisited these issues in a 1988 report and now assesses how the policy leadership of the system fared in dealing with these challenges during the past decade. He discusses other issues at the close of this article. Writing from a sociological point of view, Dentler is primarily concerned with the question of how well the public school districts and their school staff are able …

Lessons In The Common Good: Voluntarism On College Campuses, Jodi Raybuck

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article describes the current interest and activity in community service and the undergraduate educational experience. Many examples of campus-based voluntarism with a social reform twist set the stage for passage of the National and Community Trust Act of 1993. What is still necessary, however, is recognition by faculty, administrators, and agency officials that the community service experience must be structured properly, so that both service and learning take place. Drawing on the efforts at Babson College and direct involvement with the national scene, this analysis offers recommendations for implementing a program that helps to cultivate good citizenship and values.

Local Autonomy, Educational Equity, And School Choice: Constitutional Criticism Of School Reform, James J. Hilton

New England Journal of Public Policy

Many critics of America's public education system hail parental or school choice, a program that allows public school systems to compete against one another and, under some proposals, against private educational institutions, for students and educational funding, as the answer to Americas educational crisis. Proponents argue that competition will force public schools to offer students a quality education or close. This article does not evaluate the claims of the parental-choice proposals; rather, it examines the difficulties inherent in funding such a system through traditional school finance mechanisms.

The Changing Nature Of Universities, Ernest A. Lynton

New England Journal of Public Policy

Excessive emphasis on research as the dominant measure of institutional as well as individual prestige and values has created a critical mismatch between the activities of American universities and societal expectations. This article traces the origins of the resulting crisis of purpose to the post-World War II surge in federal research support and articulates the urgent need for basic changes in university priorities at a time teaching and professional services have acquired both new importance and new complexity. It further describes current efforts toward a more balanced view of the components of university missions and a resulting shift in faculty …

Teaching African-American Children: The Legacy Of Slavery, Harold Horton

New England Journal of Public Policy

The pathetic state of urban public school education offered to African-American children stems from slavery, when it was against the law to educate slaves, who were regarded as chattel. This article traces the history of the blighting of their minds by stripping those slaves of their African culture, and its effect on African-American children, as well as other children of color, today. Horton offers suggestions for coping with the problems of modern schools as related to respecting and teaching these children, pointing out that the system is the problem, not the children.