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The last two decades have seen historians and political scientists extensively study the rise of conservatism. An addition to that literature, this book offers an analysis of the state of college conservatism and explains the factors that shape the student and the citizen. Conservative pundits allege that the pervasive liberalism of America's colleges and universities has detrimental effects on undergraduates, most particularly right-leaning ones. Yet not enough attention has actually been paid to young conservatives to test these claims—until now. This book explores who conservative students are, and how their beliefs and political activism relate to their university experiences. It shows that the diverse conservative movement evolving among today's college students holds important implications for the direction of American politics.

What opportunities do digital technologies present? How do developments in digital media support scholarship and teaching yet further social justice? Written by two experts in the field, this accessible book is the first to look at scholarly practice in the digital era and consider how it can connect academics, journalists and activists in ways that foster transformation on issues of social justice. The terra firma of scholarly practice is changing. This book offers both a road map and a vision of what being a scholar can be when reimagined in the digital era to enliven the public good, as it discusses digital innovations in higher education as well as reflecting upon what these mean in an age of austerity. It is ideal for students and academics working in any field of humanities or social sciences with a social justice focus.

This book offers a compelling and uniquely detailed examination of the experiences of kindergarten students in California participating in a voluntary school desegregation program. It focuses on the day-to-day school life of a group of minority children bussed from their poor-performing home school district to an affluent neighboring district with high-performing schools. Through these kindergarteners' experiences, the book sensitively illuminates the processes of school transition, socialization, and adaptation, and addresses an array of important issues relating to American education. The book acutely observes these 'bus kids' and the quality of their social, emotional, cultural and academic experiences. It presents a moving picture of the complexity of challenges, often unrecognized by teachers and parents, each young student confronted every day.

This book presents a history of efforts to reform mathematics education in California throughout the last two decades of the 20th century. That history is a contentious one, full of such fervour and heat that participants and observers often refer to the “math wars”. The book considers the many perspectives of those involved in math reform, weaving a tapestry of facts, philosophies, conversations, events, and personalities into the narrative. While the focus is on California, the implications of this book extend to struggles over education policy and practice throughout the United States. The book's three-dimensional account of math education reform efforts reveals how the debates tend to be deeply ideological and how people come to feel misunderstood and misrepresented. It examines the myths used to explain the failure of reforms, the actual reasons for failure, and the importance of taking multiple perspectives into account when planning and implementing reform.

While the achievement gap has dominated policy discussions over the past two decades, relatively little attention has been paid to a gap that is even more at odds with American ideals: the opportunity gap. Opportunity and achievement, while inextricably connected, are very different goals. Every American will not go to college. But every American should be given fair opportunities to be prepared for college. By treating opportunity as an afterthought and obsessively focusing on measuring achievement, the nation’s policymakers have made little progress in measuring or addressing inequitable opportunities. Policy has therefore failed to engage with these challenges or with the supports and resources that lead to improvements in student learning. The achievement gap has not arisen by coincidence; children learn when they have opportunities to learn, and gaps in opportunities have led to gaps in achievement. Moreover, students’ learning experiences and outcomes are deeply affected by many factors outside the immediate control of schools.Closing the Opportunity Gap brings together top experts who offer evidence-based essays that paint a powerful and shocking picture of denied opportunities. They also describe sensible, research-based policy approaches that will enhance opportunities. They highlight the discrepancies that exist in our society and in our public schools, focusing on how policy decisions and broader circumstances conspire to create the opportunity gap that leads inexorably to the outcome differences that have become so stark.

In today's schools the number of students who receive additional resources to access the curriculum is growing rapidly, and the ongoing expansion of special education is among the most significant worldwide educational developments of the past century. Yet even among developed democracies the range of access varies hugely, from one student in twenty to one student in three. In contemporary conflicts about educational standards and accountability, special education plays a key role as it draws the boundaries between exclusion and inclusion. This book unites in-depth comparative and historical studies with analyses of global trends, with a particular focus on special and inclusive education in the United States, England, France, and Germany. The authors examine the causes and consequences of various institutional and organizational developments, illustrate differences in forms of educational governance and social policy priorities, and highlight the evolution of social logics from segregation of students with special educational needs to their inclusion in local schools.

This is an account of the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from among the Research Councils of the United Kingdom in 2005. It focuses on the campaign carried forward from the 1997 Dearing Report to the 2004 Higher Education Act to establish a public agency investing in humanities and arts research that would be equivalent to those funding natural and social science research. Built on interviews with leading participants, regional and national press coverage, and analysis of influential national studies, this book shows how engagement with contemporary issues — the knowledge economy, devolution, and the expansion of higher education — as well as a long tradition of scholarly excellence, led to the fashioning of a new model funding agency: an agency that addressed frontier issues in the arts and humanities such as increasing the scale of research, substantive collaboration with scientific fields, and explicit consideration of the results of research.

The first major battle over school choice was part of the struggle to equalize and integrate schools in the civil rights era, when it became apparent that choice could be either a serious barrier or a significant tool for reaching these goals. The second movement for choice has been very different. This large—and continuing—movement is part of an anti—government, individualistic, market—based movement in a more conservative period. This period that has forgotten many of the lessons of that earlier time, although it has once again seen choice presented as the answer to racial inequality. This book brings civil rights back to the center of the debate and moves from doctrine to empirical research in exploring the many forms of choice and their widely differing consequences for equity in US schools. The contributors conclude that although helping minority children remains a central justification for choice proponents, compelling new research shows that ignoring the essential civil rights dimensions of systems for choice usually means compounding rather than remedying racial inequality.

Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager's first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As this book reports, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost. Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, the book reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But the book finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.

The Indian higher education system commanded awe and respect in the ancient world. Important seats of learning like Nalanda and Takshashila attracted the best students and academics from across the globe. Unfortunately, over a period of time, our higher education system lost its global competitiveness. This is exemplified by the fact that not many Indian higher education institutions feature in the annual world university rankings like the Times Higher Education World University Rankings or the QS World University Rankings. At the same time, India’s aspirations to establish world-class universities have never been greater. The book is a culmination of a range of ideas and perspectives that will shape India’s aspirations of building world-class universities through comparative and international dimensions. It is a recognition that the future of Indian universities and their ability to seek global excellence will depend on three critical paradigms: first is the need for creating a vision for higher education that will focus on research and knowledge creation, institutional excellence, and global benchmarking as the indicators for standard-setting; second, the need for pursuing substantial reforms relating to policy, regulation, and governance of higher education; and third is the need for investigating a paradigmatic shift for promoting interdisciplinarity in higher education with a stronger and deeper focus on the pedagogy of teaching and learning in different fields of inquiry. Through a series of contributions from noted academics and scholars from India and around the world, this book discusses these three strings of thought, to create higher education opportunities that will enable the future generations of students to pursue world-class education in world-class universities in India.

This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education – including Steiner, Human-Scale and Forest Schools, Care Farms and Homeschooling. Based on original research with teachers, parents and young people at over fifty learning spaces, it demonstrates the importance of a geographical lens for understanding alternative education. The book argues that the geographies of alternative education are diverse: from the variegated ways in which alternative learning spaces connect and disconnect with the ‘mainstream’, to the significance of material ‘mess’ in children's learning, to the broader role that some alternative learning spaces play in challenging the increasingly neoliberal mainstream. The book will be of direct interest to academics and postgraduates in the fields of geography, sociology, education and youth studies, in particular those concerned with education. It will have broader appeal to readers from various disciplines, interested in contemporary theorisations of autonomy, emotion/affect, intergenerational relations, habit and life-itself. Given ongoing concerns about the State's role in providing children's education, and an increase during the early 21^st century of the number of alternative education providers in the UK and elsewhere, the book also highlights a series of critical questions for policy-makers and practitioners.

This book chronicles the history of education policymaking in India. The focus of the book is on the period from 1964 when the landmark Kothari Commission was constituted; however, to put the policy developments in this period into perspective major developments since the Indian Education Commission (1882) have been touched upon. The distinctiveness of the book lies in the rare insights which come from the author’s experience of making policy at the state, national and international levels; it is also the first book on the making of Indian education policy which brings to bear on the narrative comparative and historical perspectives it, which pays attention to the process and politics of policymaking and the larger setting –the political and policy environment- in which policies were made at different points of time, which attempts to subject regulation of education to a systematic analyses the way regulation of utilities or business or environment had been, and integrates judicial policymaking with the making and implementation of education policies. In fact for the period subsequent to 1979, there have been articles- may be a book or two- on some aspects of these developments individually; however, there is no comprehensive narrative that covers developments as a whole and places them against the backdrop of national and global political, economic, and educational developments.

This book tells the story of the Yale University School of Medicine, tracing its history from its origins in 1810, when it had four professors and 37 students, to its present status as one of the world's outstanding medical schools. It focuses on the important relationship of the medical school to the university, which has long operated under the precept that one should heal the body as well as the soul. The book recounts events surrounding the beginnings of the medical school, the very perilous times it experienced in the middle-and late-19th century, and its revitalization, rapid growth, and evolution throughout the 20th century. It describes the colorful individuals involved with the school and shows how social upheavals, including wars, the Depression, boom periods, social activism, and the like, affected the school. The picture it paints is that of an institution that was at times unmanageable and underfunded, that often had troubled relationships with the New Haven community and its major hospital, but that managed to triumph over these difficulties and flourish. Today Yale University School of Medicine is a center for excellence. The book draws on the themes recurrent in its rich past to offer suggestions about its future.

This book chronicles India’s quest for universal elementary education (UEE) with focus on the period after 1986, a period during which India made spectacular strides progressing from a country which accounted for a third to one with a minuscule 0.3 per cent of the out-of-school children in the world. This was also the period in which following the Jomtien Conference on Education for All and the acute macroeconomic crisis of early 1990s India mobilized funding on an unprecedented scale from development agencies like the World Bank, European Community, DFID, and UNICEF. For the first time, this book comprehensively narrates against the backdrop of national and global ideational, economic, political, and educational developments the dynamics of the engagement with development agencies, and all developments, policies, and programmes which contributed to spectacular strides. The distinctiveness of the book lies in the fact that for the first time for a book on education, and unusual even for books on policy and development cooperation the book illuminates the inner workings of governments and development agencies, the political and administrative processes and policy conflicts that were crucial in conceptualizing and implementing the policies and programmes, the complex web of interactions between the central government, state governments, and development agencies, and the innovative manner in which external funds were mobilized with the Indian government exercising leadership in its relationship with agencies, and without compromising its right country to autonomously and self-reliantly plan and implement programmes. All in all, the book provides information and many insights few, even experts, possess, and should be of interest to not only to educationists, and educational administrators but also to scholars and practitioners of development cooperation and policymaking in general.

Mothers who homeschool their children constantly face judgmental questions about their choices, and yet the homeschooling movement continues to grow with an estimated 1.5 million American children now schooled at home. These children are largely taught by stay-at-home mothers who find that they must tightly manage their daily schedules to avoid burnout and maximize their relationships with their children, and that they must sustain a desire to sacrifice their independent selves for many years in order to savor the experience of motherhood. This book is the first comprehensive look into the lives of homeschooling mothers. Drawing on rich data collected through eight years of fieldwork and dozens of in-depth interviews, the book examines the intense effects of the emotional and temporal demands that homeschooling places on mothers' lives, raising profound questions about the expectations of modern motherhood and the limits of parenting.

Police officers, armed security guards, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors are common features of the disturbing new landscape at many of today's high schools. You will also find new and harsher disciplinary practices: zero-tolerance policies, random searches with drug-sniffing dogs, and mandatory suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, despite the fact that school crime and violence have been decreasing nationally for the past two decades. While most educators, students, and parents accept these harsh policing and punishment strategies based on the assumption that they keep children safe, this book argues that we need to think more carefully about how we protect and punish students. The book shows that these policies lead schools to prioritize the rules instead of students, so that students' real problems—often the very reasons for their misbehaviour—get ignored. The book demonstrates that the policies we have zealously adopted in schools across the country are the opposite of the strategies that are known to successfully reduce student misbehavior and violence. As a result, contemporary school discipline is often unhelpful, and can be hurtful to students in ways likely to make schools more violent places. Furthermore, those students who are most at-risk of problems in schools and dropping out are the ones who are most affected by these counterproductive policies. U.S. schools and students can and should be safe, and this book offers real strategies for making them so.

This is the first book-length study of the humanities from Newman to Bologna in the Irish context. It focuses on unique characteristics of university policy in the National University that constrained humanities education. Ireland was a deeply religious country throughout the twentieth century but the colleges of its National University never established a theology or religion department. The official first language of Ireland is Irish but virtually all teaching in the Arts and Humanities is in English. The book examines the influence of such anomalies on humanities education and on Irish society in general. Has the humanities ethos of the Irish University departed radically from the educational ideals of John Henry Newman, its most illustrious ‘founder’? The book re-examines Newman’s vision for the university as well as responses to the 1908 Universities Act. It investigates how leading Irish educationalists and cultural theorists such as Padraig, Pearse, Denis Donoghue, J. J. Lee, Declan Kiberd and Richard Kearney nurtured an Irish humanities perspective in response to more established humanities traditions associated with F. R. Leavis, Edward Said, and Martha Nussbaum. The book employs a comparative approach in examining recent humanities movements such as Irish Studies and postcolonial studies. Humanities debates from other national contexts such as France, the US, and Asia are examined in light of influential work on the university by Samuel Weber, Immanuel Kant, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida. This book will appeal to the general public and to students and scholars of Irish education, history and cultural theory.

Research by universities plays an increasingly important role in shaping education policy around the world yet there is much dissatisfaction with the ways that they share that work. This much-needed, original book analyzes efforts and systems in nine countries to mobilize research knowledge, describing the various factors that support or inhibit that work. Beginning and concluding chapters offer analytical lenses for understanding these various elements across the cases. Together, this collection from a wide range of experienced contributors, provides an unprecedented international view of the way education research is produced and shared, and provides excellent signposts for improvement for researchers and those interested in more impact from research in education.

No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can't start from scratch, and it can't fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools. The good news, this book reveals, is that there is a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district—once one of the worst in the state—has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data-crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix. The results demand that we take notice—from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner-city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What's even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period.

An alarmingly high number of American students continue to lack proficiency in reading, maths, and science. The various attempts to address this problem have all too often resulted in “silver bullet” solutions such as reducing class sizes or implementing voucher programs. But this book shows, improving literacy also requires an understanding of complex and interrelated social issues that shape a child's learning. The book presents the most up-to-date research on the diverse factors that relate to a child's literacy development, from preschool to early elementary school.