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This paper illustrates how the media to frames the debate surrounding No Child Left Behind (NCLB-federal education legislation) to enhance its efforts to construct social justice in terms of individual rather than collective needs. Calling for more accountability for teachers and schools, regular testing of students to ensure adequate yearly progress, research-based teaching methods in reading and math, and more choice for parents, NCLB is the culmination of more than 25 years of education and policy debate regarding how best to address bipartisan concerns regarding public education. Examining mass media campaigns, including the use of visual imagery, article structure, and word choice of digitized print media, this paper demonstrates the effective use of the media to frame and reinforce NCLB, while attacking teachers unions and individual teachers. Analysis reveals that framing the debate on an individual level so resonates with the public that even when individuals (or the public in general) are critical of certain aspects of NLCB, they still support NCLB's overall focus. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1982 amendments in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act determined that electoral structural features were significant determinants of minority representation. The research regarding electoral system structure and representation, however, has produced conflicting results. This paper seeks to address two puzzles that remain in understanding black representation. The first puzzle examines the impact of at-large elections on African American representation. The second puzzle examines the quality of representation in different electoral structures; at-large and single member districts. Quality in this sense is defined as African-American representatives' ability to generate higher levels of benefits for the African-American community (more administrative and teaching positions for African Americans). This paper first provides a formal argument that explains the connection between electoral structures and representation for African Americans. It then moves to an empirical study using the 1800 largest school districts in the United States (based on an original survey conducted in 2001). In addition to explaining these puzzles, this paper includes how region (North and South) affects representation for African Americans in different electoral structures. It also shows how Democratic competitive states and Republican dominant states are the underlying explanation of these regional differences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue against the implementation of public policies which require or encourage individual teacher bonuses based on student test scores. Teacher incentive programs as they are now conceived and implemented in Public Education Policy are unable to produce higher levels of student success. Student achievement is often characterized as job skills learned in comparison to other students worldwide. Success and failure in student achievement should no longer be measured in terms of standardized test scores. Due to outsourcing, an increasing number of jobs in the United States require applicants to acquire advanced degrees. The traditional basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to keep American students competitive with advanced international students. Standardized testing, because it evaluates only basic skills, is not an adequate measure of student success. In order to better account for worldwide competition, measures of student achievement should compare job skills between American and international students in terms of human capital. Programs which link teacher pay to test scores will only stagnate the intellectual development of students. Public policy and education literature argues that incentive-based pay for teachers encourages instructors to focus on test-taking skills and basics without developing the critical and analytical skills of students. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the power of political images and policy narratives. I argue that the debate over desegregation policies in Los Angeles, California in the 1970s established two dominant policy images about the purposes of public schools: They are meant to promote both academic achievement and racial equality. Each of these images included several policy narratives to support it. Over the next two decades, these images remained. Eventually, however, one became more dominant over the other. As the district moved away from desegregation, the image of schools as promoters of equality diminished, and the academic achievement image took precedence. This was true for several district policies, including policies that originated as part of the desegregation plan. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines member behavior in the 108th session of the House of Representatives on immigration and education bills to assess whether Latino members offer a greater degree of representation for Latinos than non-Latino members. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exaimines the impact of education on the attitudes of Latinos and non-Latinos concerning immigration policy. The paper finds a convergence in support for a liberalized immigration policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been standard to include education as a control variable in models of American voting (McCarty et al, 2006, Gelman, 2008). However, as those same sources indicate, the effect of education on Presidential voting preferences has reversed over time with more educated voters now favoring Democrats. The goal of this paper is precisely to explain that change and the increasing importance of education (and human capital more broadly) in American voting. The research is more than a simple extension of current voting models because it can also help to explain a striking phenomenon in American political economy: while richer individuals are more likely vote Republican, richer states have favored Democrats. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, using instrumental variable regression, I seek to show that education has a causal effect on political preferences rather than simply reflecting the attitudes of those who select into schooling. Second, I investigate why education is now associated positively with Democratic voting, examining the impact of urban living, tastes for public goods, and features of high-skill economies that render voters more accepting of government spending and taxation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main question this paper investigates is why international students go to the US to study abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will investigate patterns of parental satisfaction and parental involvement in the schools over time to identify any value added by charter schools and whether any of this value added endures over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents preliminary drafts of two chapters in a book manuscript examining the role of school finance centralization in eroding state and local control of public education. The first section develops a theoretical framework of the relationship between money and control. The second section examines to what extent the federal government has been able to compel states to comply with No Child Left Behind despite contributing a relatively small portion of the total K-12 school finance burden. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines which factors make states most likely to pass legislation or begin litigation opposing NCLB. It finds that states with larger Hispanic populations, less developped standardized testing systems prior to NCLB's enactment, and fewer residents living in poverty are more likely to resist NCLB ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been several calls within the literature for public administrators to assume an educative role, recognizing the formative nature of their office. If public administrators were to accept this educative function, questions remain. Whom should administrators teach? What should be taught and in what ways might it be taught? This essay examines these questions in advocating the role of public administrator as educator.This essay would further encourage public administrators to engage citizens concerning their role within the American governance system. It is hoped that such a role for public administrators would facilitate greater public transparency and encourage citizen involvement within the American constitutional republican system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre and post assessment results data provide the basis for this study on the effects of college type on student learning and attitude change upon completion of the Introductory American Government course. The study was completed over two semesters and compares community college students to university students from two southern Illinois institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a theory of presidential campaign persuasion as a valence dimension. From 1976-2004, we find that presidential oratorical skills cause moderate voters to vote contrary to issue preferences, while more extreme voters vote based on issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political role U.S. courts play in advancing the right of education through judicial policymaking is examined in comparative perspective. The U.S. does not explicitly recognize social rights under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) protocol, and the U.S. Supreme Court does not recognize a fundamental right to education. But U.S. state courts are policymakers in guarantying the right to an adequate education in educational financing cases; and that the U.S. Supreme Court is increasingly applying foreign law to cases involving social rights. The divergent judicial policymaking trends in U.S. education cases are analyzed, as well as the political, legal, and social factors that retard and facilitate the judicial recognition of human rights, both domestically and abroad. Such factors must be overcome so as to not impede the universal recognition of a social right of education as envisioned by the ICESCR protocol. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature and extent of policy change in American politics is a central concern to scholars of the policy process. Research at the federal level suggests that 'widespread disruptions' can impact multiple policy subsystems simultaneously. Given the nature of lateral disruptions, which flow from one subsystem at the federal level to another, what may we learn from considering vertical disruptions, moving from states to the federal level and vice versa? This study considers the interactive influence of federal and state attention to education on the disruption of a long-standing, stable policy regime that organized federal activities in education in the decades following the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. This study makes two contributions to the scholarship on policy regimes and the development of federal education policy. First, it represents an initial attempt to examine the intergovernmental processes underlying regime change and issue evolution. Second, I examine the nature and stability of regime change in intergovernmental policy areas like education. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test explanations for issue-consistency based on individual education, the salience of politics, and polarizing issues across the American states, as well as alternative hypotheses rooted in institutional structure and mass-elite linkages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

College ranks are a highly charged feature of the American educational landscape. The most influential ranks are those published by the national periodical US News & World Report, and universities regularly trumpet their standings in the USN&WR ranks whenever they are able to do so. Although organizations that publish college ranks claim that their figures can distinguish minute gradations in quality across educational institutions, we show using scaling techniques that the information content in USN&WR ranks is much lower than the USN&WR organization might care to admit. Namely, our results show that USN&WR ranks cannot distinguish between the topmost educational institutions in the country. More generally, the results show that latent variables, like quality levels of academic institutions, should always be accompanied by measures of uncertainty so that users of the levels are not lulled into a false sense security in assuming that the levels are much more precise than they actually are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a model that abstracts from every possible effect of immigration on natives, except for the effects on today's and future wage distributions, in order to explain the high dispersion of immigrants' skills in the U.S. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately 42 years after the U.S. Supreme Court landmark school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its own landmark school desegregation decision, Sheff v. O'Neill. More than 10 years later, however, Hartford's schoolchildren are nearly as segregated today as they were when the case was first filed in 1989. This investigation reveals that many whites neither recognize the persistence of racial and ethnic inequality in the schools nor acknowledge the existence of white privilege and advantage that this situation creates. Short of a mandatory desegregation order form the Court, the future of school integration in Connecticut is highly in doubt. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Randon intercept models are estimated to assess the influence of two types of educational exchange programs on the human rights performance of states: (1) educational exchange programs hosted by the US military for military officers from around the world, and (2) educational exchanges hosted by US universities for university-level foreign students. The results show that participation in civilian educational exchanges are not as straightforward a socialization process that some research might have implied. For a variety of possible reasons, civilian university-level study in the United States was not associated with level of human rights practice in the home countries of the foreign exchange students. The empirical evidence presented does, however, provide some evidence that military educational exchange programs are associated with improving human rights practices (or at the worst have no effect). ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garbage can processes in U.S. and Japanese education agenda formation have 1) facilitated the spread of trendy administrative reforms, 2) prevented rational planning and coordination, and 3) prevented pressing education problems from being addressed. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]