Education Commons^™

Secondary Education In The United States: What Can Others Learn From Our Mistakes?, John H. Bishop , Ferran Mane, Michael Bishop

John H Bishop

Secondary schools are the least successful component of the U.S. education system. Students learn considerably less than in other industrialized nations and dropout rates are significantly higher. This paper provides an explanation for this failure, describes the standards based reforms strategies that many states are implementing to attack these problems, and evaluates the success of these efforts.

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 …

Proyecto Desarrollo: Café Saludable [9th-11th Grade], Susanna Pierce

Understanding by Design: Complete Collection

The United Nations Development Program seeks to eliminate poverty by promoting economic growth among underdeveloped and developing nations. Professionals within the organization strive to improve education, health standards, and infrastructure of these nations in order to boost standards of living. Because the majority of Latin America consists of developing nations, equipping the next generation with the basic Spanish language skills and economic knowledge to address the issues of our world’s poorest nations is imperative. Through collaborative efforts, we can address the Millennium Development Goals of alleviating the disease and poverty that pervade these countries. In this interdisciplinary unit, students will …

Determining Future Success Of College Students, Paul Oehrlein

Undergraduate Economic Review

Many people invest a lot of money in order to go to college with the hope that they will eventually be rewarded with higher salaries. This paper attempts to determine what aspects of college are most important in determining the future income of students. In particular, this paper studies whether GPA is an important determinant of income as well as whether some majors are better investments than others after controlling for other factors. In addition, the effect of math and verbal ability on income and how they interact with different fields of study are examined. The data comes from the …

The Intersection Of Judicial Attitudes And Litigant Selection Theories: Explaining U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making, Jeff L. Yates, Elizabeth Coggins

Jeff L Yates

Two prominent theories of legal decision making provide seemingly contradictory explanations for judicial outcomes. In political science, the Attitudinal Model suggests that judicial outcomes are driven by judges' sincere policy preferences -- judges bring their ideological inclinations to the decision making process and their case outcome choices largely reflect these policy preferences. In contrast, in the law and economics literature, Priest and Klein's well-known Selection Hypothesis posits that court outcomes are largely driven by the litigants' strategic choices in the selection of cases for formal dispute or adjudication -- forward thinking litigants settle cases where potential judicial outcomes are readily …

Teaching Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

Ethical considerations intersect with economics education on a number of planes. Nonetheless, in terms of curricula, only a handful of economics departments offer courses specifically focused on ethics. This chapter addresses the ways in which instructors can incorporate ethical components into teaching principles and field courses in order to broaden economic understanding and to enhance critical thinking. It examines three pedagogical issues: the artificial dichotomy between positive and normative analysis; the limiting scope of efficiency in outcomes analyses; and the incorporation of alternative ethical frameworks into public policy debates.

Moral Reasoning In Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

The Teagle discussion analyzes why economics teachers have become overly narrow in their pedagogical perspectives, thus pulling back from fully supporting the liberal arts agenda. In Chapter 1, Colander and McGoldrick (p. 6) observe that the generalist approach that excites students by asking "big think" questions across disciplinary boundaries fails to generate new knowledge, while the narrow "little think" questions that can be answered often fail to develop the critical thinking skills necessary for liberal education. As one example, the authors cite the decline of moral reasoning in economics, which was once center stage in Adam Smith's analysis of society. …

Chapter 4: Teaching Civic And Governement, And Economics, Andrew P. Johnson

Elementary and Literacy Education Department Publications

This chapter examines the teaching of civics and government, and of economics. Below are listed the NCSS teacher expectations in each of these content areas as well as ideas for teaching. This chapter ends with a description of global education, a newer area of social studies that incorporates a variety of disciplines and their global impact.

This article is an excerpt from Johnson, A. (2009). Making connections in elementary and middle school social studies (2nd ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.