Digital Commons Network^™

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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In this special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, we explore some of the more perennial but nonetheless substantive issues involved in the ongoing debate about the shape educational reform should take from different points of view, and seek that most sought-after and elusive alchemist, common ground.

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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.

Regulation Of Water Use And Takings: A Growing Battlefield, Barton H. Thompson, Jr.

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

43 pages.

Contains references.

Management Approaches To Addressing Takings Issues: Endangered Species Protection, I. Michael Heyman

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

15 pages.

Contains footnotes.

Regulation Of Water Use And Takings—The Government Lawyer’S Perspective, Richard M. Frank

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

11 pages.

Contains 3 pages of references.

Private Property Rights Protection Legislation Across The Nation, Nancie G. Marzulla

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

25 pages (includes 1 map).

Contains footnotes.

Regulatory Takings And Resources: What Are The Constitutional Limits?, John D. Echeverria

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

25 pages.

Searching For Basinwide Solutions To Endangered Species Problems Of The South Platte Of Colorado, James S. Lochhead

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

42 pages (includes illustrations and map).

Contains endnotes.

Regulatory Taking Of Public Water And Land Resource Development Rights After Lucas, Jerome C. Muys

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

7 pages.

“Takings” And The Endangered Species Act, Oliver A. Houck

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

3 pages.

Mining Regulation And Takings, Mark Squillace

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

10 pages.

Contains footnotes.

Mining Regulation(S) And Takings, Lawrence G. Mcbride

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

12 pages.

Contains footnotes.

The Fifth Amendment And The Retained Sovereignty Doctrine: A Study Of The Endangered Species Act And The Central Valley Project Improvement Act As Applied To Central Valley Project Water Service Contracts, Brian E. Gray

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

12 pages.

What A Federal Natural Resource Management Agency Can Do To Avoid Takings, John D. Leshy

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

6 pages.

The Endangered Species Act And Constitutional Takings, Robert Meltz

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

18 pages.

Contains references.

Mining Regulation And Takings, L. Thomas Galloway

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

15 pages.

City Of Tigard And Takings Law, Richard D. Lazarus

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

10 pages.

Contains 1 page of references.