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INTRODUCTION The United States has extraordinarily low voter turnout compared to other liberal democracies. (1) Turnout soared in the 2020 presidential election to its highest point in over 120 years [...]

Abstract Canadian public school board trustees are generally chosen by way of public ballot in civic elections. A comparison of board governance literature to a local narrative account of public [...]

It is easy to gain the impression that public education in Australia is 'under attack'. There has been a demonstrable increase in enrolments in private schools in recent years. (1) [...]

As this editorial goes to press, Super Tuesday is still spinning in the news cycle. The dramatic primary and caucus season is in full swing, as no candidate has yet [...]

Both liberals and conservatives agree that civic education must go beyond civic knowledge and civic skills to include proper civic motives and dispositions; that is, they all properly agree that civic education must aim at civic virtue, even if they disagree about which precise virtues ought to be learned. Unfortunately, both liberals and conservatives also agree that such an education in civic virtue is the responsibility of public schools. But just because civic virtues must be learned does not mean that they can be taught--let alone that they can be taught in school. By assessing the best empirical studies of the effectiveness of civic education in schools, I show that civic schooling aimed at civic virtue is at best ineffective and is, indeed, often counterproductive. Moreover, advocates of civic schooling argue that schools need a compelling moral purpose and that civic education is the most appropriate moral purpose in a diverse democratic society. These normative arguments fail to grasp that academic schooling already has a compelling moral purpose, namely, to impart the intellectual virtues, that is, those dispositions making us conscientious in the pursuit of truth. Civic schooling is either irrelevant to the intrinsic moral purpose of schooling or positively subversive of it. I show that the history of civic schooling is a history of the subordination of truth-seeking to some civic agenda, leading to the whitewashing and distortion of academic knowledge. Finally, I argue that civic schooling aimed at civic virtue is inherently partisan and thereby violates the civic trust that underpins vibrant public schools. Keywords: civic education, civics, intellectual virtues, philosophy of education, schooling

American public schools were founded in a tradition that emphasized the importance of local educational autonomy and strong local communities. The Brown Decision, a landmark in the struggle for racial equality, began the historical trend of removing control over schools from locally elected officials to non-elected officials of the federal government, thus making schools even poorer and more dependent upon federal largesse.

My sister once told me a story about a husband and wife who drove across the country with their three-year-old son. They figured the kid would get bored, but he [...]

Summary. This paper expands on the school finance literature by using a political fragmentation index to calculate how political power affects educational spending in Virginia, USA. The methodology allows the comparison of different political voices relative to each other and the consideration of the role of the distribution of political power. Political fragmentation is considered across several different dimensions, including race, age, income and political parties. Using a demand for local public goods model, it is found that, along with traditional demand variables, the interest-group pressures dominated by the primary beneficiaries (teachers and students) increase educational spending while higher income and a larger percentage of African-Americans in the population reduce educational spending.

In Baltimore, the mayor's lack of success at school reform led to a state takeover of the city's schools, In Washington, D.C., mayoral control has begun to stabilize the system. [...]

Public education in the US is generally regarded as advancing the cause of Western civilization by teaching knowledge and skills and are closely associated with individual rights. However, the concepts of Michel Foucault suggest that modern education is also about gaining advantage, retaining power, and marginalizing various groups.

Pro-voucher arguments from the Left and pro-equity views from the Right are discussed. Topics include public education, equity and accountability in public education, and educating children for success.

Liberalism has always had a powerful concern with the education of its citizens. But who should exercise final authority over the education - parents or the state? The answer rests, in large part, on our understanding of the character of the self-rule or autonomy to be taught. For as 'autonomy' comes to mean unpredetermined 'choice,' it becomes ever more difficult to justify parental control of education. In fact, parental control, supported by the earliest liberals, is now thought to produce 'ethical servility.' Liberal theorists - such as John Dewey Amy Gutmann, and Eamonn Callan - break with thinkers like Locke and Mill in allowing the state to override parental preferences in the name of greater equality, preparation for autonomy and democratic deliberation. We argue that taking educational authority away from parents and giving it to the state is an illiberal policy, meaning one that fails to abide by Locke's central distinction of political and parental power. This failure will lead both to greater ethical servility and to fewer reasonable alternatives from which autonomous individuals can choose.

By any measure, public education in America's cities is in deep trouble, and has been for some time. On any given day in Cleveland, almost one of every six students [...]

This article discusses the political clout wielded by a group of white women who participate in 'Presidents' Committee,' an organization of Parents Association presidents in a New York City Community School District. The school district, like many urban areas, is experiencing an exodus of white families to the suburbs, which are seen as offering better resources and a safe social distance from blacks and other non-whites. In this context of social change, white mothers who participate in Presidents' Committee push at gender boundaries in the public sphere by professionalizing motherhood and watching over potentially corrupt political practices. At the same time, their activism can be understood as a key component of local efforts to reproduce 'white' community. Through this ethnographic analysis, 'whiteness' is unpacked as a construct that is fractured by gender, class, and place of origin, while remaining a resilient idealized resource with which to reproduce a black/white racial binary. Key Words: whiteness, gender, schools, race relations, activism

For Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, filing a lawsuit against the No Child Left Behind Act must have seemed like an obvious winner. More and more attorney generals around the [...]