Education for Everyday People: Obstacles and Opportunities Facing the Obama Administration

2009 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Ladson-Billings

In this essay, Gloria Ladson-Billings describes her reaction to Barack Obama's election and her desire to share these historic moments with folks she considers "everyday people." She then looks to the future of education in the United States and highlights obstacles to the Obama administration's meaningful engagement with education issues. Ladson-Billings uses the frame of interest convergence to suggest that this new administration has the opportunity to engage in pragmatic politics and to put forward polices that simultaneously promote both the interests of public school students—particularly those from disenfranchised communities—and national interests. She illustrates this argument through a chronicle imagining a future discussion among the president's cabinet. Finally, she closes by describing the power of the president's inauguration for uniting diverse communities and broadening the definition of everyday people.

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donya Khalili ◽  
Arthur Caplan

Every September, millions of parents around the country herd their children into pediatricians’ offices with school immunization forms in hand. Their kids have already received a dozen or more shots before the age of two, and, depending on the state in which they live, a dozen more may await them over the ensuing decade. To protect public health, states require that parents have their children immunized before they are permitted to attend public or private school, but the rules vary for homeschooled children. With the spectacular growth in the number of homeschooled students, it is becoming more difficult to reach these youth to ensure that they are immunized at all. These children are frequently unvaccinated, leaving them open to infection by diseases that have been all but stamped out in the United States by immunization requirements. States should encourage parents to have their homeschooled students vaccinated by enacting the same laws that are used for public school students, enforcing current laws through neglect petitions, or requiring that children be immunized before participating in school-sponsored programs.


Author(s):  
Donna Farland-Smith

In the last 60 years, many researchers have thoroughly examined public school students' perceptions of scientists (Barman, 1997; Chambers, 1983; Fort & Varney, 1989; Mead & Meraux, 1957; Schibeci & Sorenson, 1983). It has long been established and commonly accepted that many students, for example, perceive scientists in a negative light, as living lonely and isolated lives, being detached from reality and constrained by their work (Barman, 1997; Chambers, 1983; Fort & Varney, 1989; Mead & Meraux, 1957; Schibeci & Sorenson, 1983). Throughout this sixty years there has been an increase in learning about scientists outside these traditional settings public school classroom. Over 1.7 million students (3.4% of the population) in the United States are homeschooled. An investigation of home-schooled students' and their perceptions of scientists have never been investigated. This chapter compares home-school students in grades two through 10 with public school students in the same grades to determine if any differences exist between the groups relative to their perceptions of scientists.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-79
Author(s):  
Nargiza Sodikova ◽  
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Important aspects of French foreign policy and national interests in the modern time,France's position in international security and the specifics of foreign affairs with the United States and the European Union are revealed in this article


Author(s):  
Yale H. Ferguson ◽  
Richard W. Mansbach

This chapter addresses the erosion of the postwar liberal global order and the accompanying disorder in global politics. It describes the perceptions of declining US hegemony during the Obama administration of American decline and the return of geopolitical and economic rivalries that are undermining the liberal order. The election of President Donald Trump in 2016 in the United States was the most significant manifestation of national populism that has emerged in recent years in Europe and elsewhere. The profile of supporters of national populism are much the same globally. They oppose so-called elites and immigrants (especially minorities) whom they blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs. After defining national populism, the chapter describes how it fosters isolationism and malignant nationalism and focuses on national interests rather than global cooperation. Such policies threaten the movement of goods and people, multinational global organizations, and the postwar order in which globalization thrives.


Author(s):  
Takis S. Pappas

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers significant questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including: • What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy? • Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late? • Is Trump a populist and, if so, could he be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan? • Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil? • Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism? • Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds? • Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule? • What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy? Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways the reader understands populism and imagines the prospects of liberal democracy.


1974 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce E. Lindsay ◽  
Cleve E. Willis

The spread of suburbs into previously rural areas has become commonplace in the United States. A rather striking aspect of this phenomenon has been the discontinuity which results. This aspect is often manifest in a haphazard mixture of unused and densely settled areas which has been described as “sprawl”. A more useful definition of suburban sprawl, its causes, and its consequences, is provided below in order to introduce the econometric objectives of this paper.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathan D. Shukla ◽  
Tracy E. Waasdorp ◽  
Sarah Lindstrom Johnson ◽  
Mercedes Gabriela Orozco Solis ◽  
Amanda J. Nguyen ◽  
...  

School climate is an important construct for guiding violence prevention efforts in U.S. schools, but there has been less consideration of this concept in its neighboring country Mexico, which has a higher prevalence of violence. The U.S. Department of Education outlined a three-domain conceptualization of school climate (i.e., safe and supportive schools model) that includes engagement, safety, and the school environment. To examine the applicability of this school climate model in Mexico, the present study tested its measurement invariance across middle school students in the United States ( n = 15,099) and Mexico ( n = 2,211). Findings supported full invariance for engagement and modified-safety scales indicating that factor loadings and intercepts contributed almost equally to factor means, and scale scores were comparable across groups. Partial invariance was found for the environment scales. Results of a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) consisting of all 13 school climate scales indicated significantly positive associations among all scales in the U.S. sample and among most scales in the Mexico sample. Implications of these findings are discussed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (04) ◽  
pp. 933-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Hamlin

International law provides nations with a common definition of a refugee, yet the processes by which countries determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many institutional, cultural, geographical, and political similarities. This article compares the refugee status determination regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations—the United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite these nations' similar border control policies, asylum seekers crossing their borders access three very different systems. These differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with the level of insulation the administrative decision-making agency enjoys from political interference and judicial review. Bureaucratic justice is conceptualized and organized differently in different states, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and nonrefugee.


Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. When this mass-produced game crossed the Pacific it created waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Mahjong narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women’s culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American pastime. This book also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game for a variety of economic and cultural purposes, including entrepreneurship, self-expression, philanthropy, and ethnic community building. One result was the forging of friendships within mahjong groups that lasted decades. This study unfolds in two parts. The first half is focused on mahjong’s history as related to consumerism, with a close examination of its economic and cultural origins. The second half explores how mahjong interwove with the experiences of racial inclusion and exclusion in the evolving definition of what it means to be American. Mahjong players, promoters, entrepreneurs, and critics tell a broad story of American modernity. The apparent contradictions of the game—as both American and foreign, modern and supposedly ancient, domestic and disruptive of domesticity—reveal the tensions that lie at the heart of modern American culture.


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