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Charter schools are increasingly being heralded as a solution to the dismal education condition of many schools and school districts across the United States. Despite the proliferation of charter schools and their supporters, the school choice debate remains contentious. This paper seeks to advance the school choice debate by shifting the discussion away from whether charter schools are positive or negative, to explaining why research has found evidence that supports both claims. I ask: what explains the variance in student achievement in different charter schools? To answer this question I analyzed data from all charter and traditional schools in the seven largest urban Texas schools districts. The empirical analysis suggests that school expenditure has a positive and significant impact on student achievement. Urban Texas charter schools appear to respond to competitive pressures for increased academic achievement by increasing teacher salaries and hiring more teachers. Contrary to expectations, however, revenue levels do not seem to impact expenditure levels in the charter schools examined. If expenditure helps explain student achievement levels in charter schools, as this analysis suggests, a deeper understanding of expenditure variation is necessary to more effectively predict when charter schools are likely to have positive impacts on student achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces out the connections between political theory and political commentary through an analysis of the relationship between the editorial stance of Dissent magazine and the academic work of its staff, in particular that of Irving Howe and Michael Walzer. It argues that central to the political thought of the Dissent circle was a rejection of the ideological puritanism of the magazine's critics, targets, and interlocutors, both academic and public intellectual. Dissent's major theoretical contribution was to try to work out a space for a policy-oriented platform that draws upon the best that competing political ideologies have to offer while transcending them. Thus, Howe and Michael Harrington sought a socialism that drew upon valuable liberal insights and socialized them, while Walzer looked for a permanent uneasy co-existence between liberalism, social democracy, and communitarianism. I situate Walzer's famous article "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism" as an intellectual descendant of Howe's Socialism and America, seeking to extend that work, which offered articles of conciliation between liberalism and socialism, to incorporate communitarianism too. In staking out this position, the Dissent circle made valuable contributions to the practice of both activist politics and political theory throughout the period between the magazine's establishment in 1953 and the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of representation an individual or group receives depends on political sophistication. Those who are more politically sophisticated are significantly advantaged relative to those who are less so. This paper analyzes the causes of sophistication paying particular attention to the variable most commonly identified as the primary cause of differences within the mass public, educational attainment. Using panel data first collected before some respondents attended college, I show that there are virtually no effects of attending and graduating from college on sophistication. Then, I elaborate an explanation of pre-adult political sophistication that I test and find accounts for a substantial portion of the spurious relationship between education and political sophistication. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to determine the impact of school funding on student outcomes. A great deal of research has been conducted on the subject with a varying degree of success in linking school funding and student outcome measures (see Meier and Wood, eds., 2004 for a recent summary of the literature). Our paper continues with this research. We argue that graduation rates are an inappropriate measure of student outcomes. Instead student achievement can now be measured with the standardized graduation tests formalized by No Child Left Behind. Our analysis reveals that while graduation rates are not linked to school funding, district passage rates on the standardized graduation tests are. To examine these issues, we have limited our study to the state of Ohio. Our paper outlines the funding history in the state of Ohio and the most recent attempts to satisfy the dictates of the Ohio Supreme Court's rulings in the DeRolph case. Next we lay out several models to determine the impact of school funding on student outcomes. We conclude by suggesting further research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on theoretical perspectives on educational exclusion within the context of social exclusion regarding multicultural families in South Korea. Topics discussed include international marriage between Korean bachelors and foreign women in agriculture sector, educational programs demands in immigrant brides except Korean Chinese and problems in multicultural children's academic achievement.

The article focuses on a study that seeks to determine policies that can offer the greatest prospects for reducing the educational attainment gap in the Inland Empire of Southern California. It analyzes a wide variety of educational demonstration projects to determine what type of policies are most likely to reduce the educational attainment gap. It cites the effects of the increasing gap in educational attainment on the entire economic health of the region.

The article focuses on a study which examined the effectiveness of using web simulations of extensive form games for undergraduate courses. The study included students in a course that utilized a simulation of the legislative process of the U.S. Congress. Study findings revealed that students perceive improvement in their academic performance. However, direct measures did not show any evidence of the efficacy of simulations in improving student performance.

This article discusses portfolio in the context of the academic world. The term "portfolio" in the academy refers to a folio of academic writings or of student work that reflects performance over time. Included is a list of publications published by Jossey-Bass on assessment, outcomes and portfolio assessment. Particular focus is given to the use of portfolios in assessing student learning, as well as identifying program strengths and shortcomings. Both lower and upper division courses at California Polytechnic State University use portfolios.

The article deals with a study that examined the relationship between school choice, school communities and fifth grade student test scores using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) data. Value communities and functional communities are two types of school communities considered in this study. Results of the study showed that third and fifth grade students who attend private schools performed better on reading and math tests. It also found that third and fifth grade Catholic school students outperform those who attend public schools.