What Americans Want from Public Schools

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Hochschild ◽  
Nathan Scovronick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
American Dream ◽  
The United States ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
State Governments ◽  
European Welfare State ◽  
The Government ◽  
Main Activity

AMERICANS CONTINUE TO FOLLOW the advice of Benjamin Franklin in making “the proper education of youth” the most important American social policy. Public education uses more resources and involves more people than any other government program for social welfare. It is the main activity of local governments and the largest single expenditure of almost all state governments. Education is the American answer to the European welfare state, to massive waves of immigration, and to demands for the abolition of subordination based on race, class, or gender. Although public schools in the United States are expected to accomplish a lot for their students, underlying all of these tasks is the goal of creating the conditions needed for people to believe in and pursue the ideology of the American dream. Our understanding of the American dream is the common one, described by President Clinton this way: “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one—if you work hard and play by the rules you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.” The dream is the unwritten promise that all residents of the United States have a reasonable chance to achieve success through their own efforts, talents, and hard work. Success is most often defined in material terms, but everyone gets to decide what it is for himself or herself. The first man to walk across Antarctica talks about this idea in the same way as people who make their first million: “The only limit to achievement,” he said, “is the limit you place on your own dreams. Let your vision be guided by hope, your path be adventurous, and the power of your thoughts be directed toward the betterment of tomorrow.” The American dream is a brilliant ideological invention, although, as we shall see, in practice it leaves much to be desired. Its power depends partly on the way it balances individual and collective responsibilities. The role of the government is to make the pursuit of success possible for everyone. This implies strict and complete nondiscrimination, universal education to provide the means for pursuing success, and protection for virtually all views of success, regardless of how many people endorse them.

Government and Fiscal Policy in American Economic History

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-224
Author(s):  
John Joseph Wallis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Property Tax ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Payroll Taxes ◽  
The Third ◽  
State And Local

Over the last 225 years, government finances in the United States have gone through three distinct stages. In the first stage, 1790–1850, state governments actively pursued policies to promote economic development and financed them from revenues from state investments. In the second, 1850–1930, local governments became the most important level of government, as measured by revenues and expenditures, and revenues shifted toward the property tax. In the third period, 1930 to the present, the national government became the most active and largest level of government, financed through income and payroll taxes, and developed an extensive network of grants to state and local governments. The chapter tracks the changes in sources of revenues and purpose of expenditures, with specific attention paid to military spending over the entire period.

American Democracy Reconsidered: Part I

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Government ◽  
The State ◽  
City Government ◽  
State Governments ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
The Government ◽  
The One

In his celebrated study of American democracy written in 1888, Lord Bryce reserved his most condemnatory reflections for city government and in a muchquoted passage asserted: ‘There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States. The deficiencies of the National government tell but little for evil on the welfare of the people. The faults of the State governments are insignificant compared with the extravagance, corruption and mismanagement which mark the administration of most of the great cities'sangeetha.

Introduction

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Hochschild ◽  
Nathan Scovronick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
American Dream ◽  
School Funding ◽  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Individual

THE AMERICAN DREAM IS A POWERFUL CONCEPT. It encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it creates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her own dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the collective good of all. From the perspective of the individual, the ideology is as compelling as it is simple. “I am an American, so I have the freedom and opportunity to make whatever I want of my life. I can succeed by working hard and using my talents; if I fail, it will be my own fault. Success is honorable, and failure is not. In order to make sure that my children and grandchildren have the same freedom and opportunities that I do, I have a responsibility to be a good citizen— to respect those whose vision of success is different from my own, to help make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, to participate in the democratic process, and to teach my children to be proud of this country.” Not all residents of the United States believe all of those things, of course, and some believe none of them. Nevertheless, this American dream is surprisingly close to what most Americans have believed through most of recent American history. Public schools are where it is all supposed to start—they are the central institutions for bringing both parts of the dream into practice. Americans expect schools not only to help students reach their potential as individuals but also to make them good citizens who will maintain the nation’s values and institutions, help them flourish, and pass them on to the next generation. The American public widely endorses both of these broad goals, values public education, and supports it with an extraordinary level of resources. Despite this consensus Americans disagree intensely about the education policies that will best help us achieve this dual goal. In recent years disputes over educational issues have involved all the branches and levels of government and have affected millions of students. The controversies—over matters like school funding, vouchers, bilingual education, high-stakes testing, desegregation, and creationism—seem, at first glance, to be separate problems.

Paths to (de)centralization: Changing territorial dynamics of social policy in the People’s Republic of China and the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 897-915
Author(s):  
Daniel Béland ◽  
Philip Rocco ◽  
Shih-Jiunn Shi ◽  
Alex Waddan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
State Governments ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Republic Of China

Drawing on the existing welfare state literature, this article offers a comparative analytical framework to account for the territorial dynamics of social policy in the United States and the People’s Republic of China, two countries that are most dissimilar in terms of political regime but that may exhibit similar territorial patterns of social policy fragmentation. A promising way to explore such patterns, we argue, is to analyze how changes in the architecture of major governing institutions affect the territorial dimension of social policy. In the United States, state governments and a territorially-organized federal legislature have increasingly accommodated national political parties. These two parties have turned the politics of social policy into a debate over the boundaries of national or state governance of social policy, resulting in multi-level governance frameworks. In the People’s Republic of China, the partisan dimension is absent, but strong economic pressures on the central bureaucracy have made devolution a functional imperative and have given local governments increasing leverage when bargaining with the center.

Expanding Promise, Debating Means: Separate and Integrated Schooling for Immigrants, English-language Learners, Girls, and Boys,

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Minow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
English Language Learners ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
English Language ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
The Government ◽  
Integrated Or

Spurred by the social and legal struggles surrounding Brown, parents and advocates during the twentieth century and into the present have pursued equal schooling along other dimensions of exclusion and inequality by working through court challenges, legislation, and other initiatives. Brown enshrined equality as the entitlement for all students, even as the work leading to and following Brown identified avenues for advocates concerned for students learning English, immigrants, girls, boys, and others left out or mistreated by public schooling. American public schools have grown preoccupied with the aspiration of equality and the language of inclusion. Yet no less pervasive is the struggle over whether equality is to be realized through integrated or separate settings. The debates involve politics, prejudices, and social science studies. Shifting political tides and cultural attitudes, as well as legal debates, reflect and also aggravate uncertainties about what kinds of instruction actually promote equal opportunities for all children. Often called “a nation of immigrants” (with the elision, then, of Native Americans and slaves), the United States has offered opportunities but also presided over mistreatment of newcomers on the basis of language, accent, derogatory ideas about their country of origin, or general negative attitudes toward foreigners. Such attitudes include the conflation of “foreign” with “illegal,” the confusion of immigrant with noncitizen, and the equation of being a speaker of Spanish (and other native tongues) with being “non-American.” The tradition of forced assimilation starts first not with immigrants but with the Native Americans, beginning with the Civilization Act of 1819, under which the government removed Indian children from their family cultures and placed them in federally funded missionary schools, not to further integrate them with other students but to “civilize” them. In addition, as the United States displaced Mexico in parts of the Southwest, families who never moved gradually found themselves dealing with a contest over language, race, and culture.

scholarly journals Influencing Clients in Counterinsurgency: U.S. Involvement in El Salvador's Civil War, 1979–92

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter C. Ladwig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The U.S

After a decade and a half of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. policymakers want to change their approach to COIN by providing aid and advice to local governments rather than directly intervening with U.S. forces. Both this strategy and U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in general, however, do not acknowledge the difficulty of convincing clients to follow U.S. COIN prescriptions. The historical record suggests that, despite a shared aim of defeating an insurgency, the United States and its local partners have had significantly different goals, priorities, and interests with respect to the conduct of their counterinsurgency campaigns. Consequently, a key focus of attention in any future counterinsurgency assistance effort should be on shaping the client state's strategy and behavior. Although it is tempting to think that providing significant amounts of aid will generate the leverage necessary to affect a client's behavior and policies, the U.S. experience in assisting the government of El Salvador in that country's twelve-year civil war demonstrates that influence is more likely to flow from tight conditions on aid than from boundless generosity.

scholarly journals Managed retreat through voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. eaax8995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine J. Mach ◽  
Caroline M. Kraan ◽  
Miyuki Hino ◽  
A. R. Siders ◽  
Erica M. Johnston ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
Social Vulnerability ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Open Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
The Government

Retreat from some areas will become unavoidable under intensifying climate change. Existing deployments of managed retreat are at small scale compared to potential future needs, leaving open questions about where, when, and how retreat under climate change will occur. Here, we analyze more than 40,000 voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties in the United States, in which homeowners sell properties to the government and the land is restored to open space. In contrast to model-based evaluation of potential future retreat, local governments in counties with higher population and income are more likely to administer buyouts. The bought-out properties themselves, however, are concentrated in areas of greater social vulnerability within these counties, pointing to the importance of assessing the equity of buyout implementation and outcomes. These patterns demonstrate the challenges associated with locally driven implementation of managed retreat and the potential benefits of experimentation with different approaches to retreat.

Financing Community Resilience Before Disaster Strikes: Lessons From the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte L. Kirschner ◽  
Akheil Singla ◽  
Angie Flick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Community Resilience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Disaster Resilience ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Ex Ante ◽  
State And Local

As more and more of the population moves to areas prone to natural hazards, the costs of disasters are on the rise. Given that these events are an eventuality, governments must aid their communities in promoting disaster resilience, enabling their communities to reduce their susceptibility to natural hazards, and adapting to and recovering from disasters when they occur. The federal system in the United States divides these responsibilities among national, state, and local governments. Local and state governments are largely responsible for the direct provision of services to their communities, and the Stafford Act of 1988 provides that the federal government will pay at least 75% of all eligible expenses once a presidential major disaster declaration has been made. As a result, state and local governments have become largely reliant on transfers from the federal government to pay for disaster relief and recovery efforts. This system encourages state and local governments to ignore the risks they face and turn to the federal government for aid after a disaster. This system also seems to underemphasize an important mechanism that can bolster disaster resilience: financing the costs of disasters in advance through ex ante budgeting. Four tools for budgeting ex ante—intergovernmental grants, disaster stabilization funds, the municipal bond market, and hazard insurance—are described and examples of their use provided. Despite limited use by state governments, these tools provide governments the opportunity to build community resilience to disasters by budgeting ex ante for them.

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