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Postsecondary student demographics are dramatically shifting in the state of Texas, resulting in an increased need for state government resources to ensure college access affordability in the state. It is critical that lawmakers prioritize higher education to allow Texans from all backgrounds access to afford higher education. This editorial is an overview of the Texas 86th Legislature's increased investment in need-based financial aid, disparate state funding to public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), proposals of state College Promise programs, and legislation aimed at serving nontraditional students. Together, these investments and programs demonstrate that the Texas Legislature has taken positive steps to improving higher education access and affordability but must increase focus on and investment in higher education in the future to ensure the economic prosperity of Texas.

Public education in America continues to be viewed as being worthy of major investments to improve the county's economic position in the world. But quality education for many Americans is still not within their reach. Fifty years after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in "Brown v. Board of Education" eliminating legal segregation of public education by race the country is still a long ways from realizing quality education for all of its citizens. This paper explores what happened in public education after "Brown": changes in the demographics of the population, and economic changes world wide that should motivate the county to invest more to education minority children. Educational inequality is the major source of the pool from which America produces its labor force is changing; and demographic changes in the population along racial lines is increasing at a faster rate than in the past. This paper also focuses on the ability to produce well educated students to be more competitive economically given a more racial and ethnically diverse population.

This paper examines the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) "PISA for Schools," a new variant of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that compares school-level performance on reading, math and science with international schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Finland). Specifically, I focus here on a professional learning community--the "Global Learning Network" (GLN)--of U.S. schools and districts that have voluntarily participated in PISA for Schools, and how this, arguably, helps to normatively determine "what works" in education. Drawing suggestively across diverse thinking around contemporary modes of governance, and emerging topological spaces and relations associated with globalization, and informed by interviews with 33 policy actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, my analyses suggest that GLN allows the OECD to discursively and normatively constrain how "world-class" schools and systems, and their policies and practices, are defined. However, and in light of the productive capacities of power relations, I also argue that GLN provides opportunities for local educators and leaders to undertake meaningful collaboration and sharing, and to find policy spaces outside of those defined by more performative discursive framings of school accountability. To this end, I explore how GLN may help to foster alternative policy spaces from which educators can "talk back" to national and state authorities, and potentially promote more "authentic" understandings of, and possibilities for, schooling accountability.

This study illustrates the benefits of public-private partnerships in creating public corporations to build sport venues. In addition to potential returns, public officials' understanding of the potential structures of these authorities is equally important. Additionally, as the scope of public-private partnerships broadens, it is essential for administrators of secondary and higher level education to recognize the benefits of and understand the structure of these partnerships. This study presents the structures of four authorities and the details of the sport-related partnerships they entered. The authorities include the Gateway Economic Development Corporation of Greater Cleveland, Indianapolis Capital Improvement Board, Frisco Economic Development Corporation, and Detroit Downtown Development Authority. In each instance, individual outcomes were analyzed. This paper illustrates the range of responsibilities that could be assigned to authorities and the potential for benefits to be generated for teams, cities, universities, and school districts. The results from each partnership reflect the structure of the public authority. To protect the public's interest, the legislation creating a new public corporation must clearly outline its objectives, structure, and responsibilities. But when cities, universities, and school districts utilize authorities for sport-related development projects, the opportunities for achieving public policy goals are more expansive than many realize.

Unconventional oil and gas production in the United States reversed a decades-old trend of rising oil imports, provided an argument for lifting the U.S. crude oil export ban and motivated the development of domestic natural gas export facilities. But the most visible impact of unconventional-hydrocarbon extraction is the creation of boomtowns in rural regions. Despite widespread media coverage, scholarly analysis of boomtowns is restricted to regional econometric studies with little attention to how economic stakeholders understand and respond to booming economies. Here we analyze interviews with key economic stakeholders in the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas. Respondents consider their community's economic success relative to the price of oil and indicate concerns about the deterioration of roads, high housing demand, and skyrocketing wages. We also re-examine John Gilmore's foundational work on boomtowns in the 1970s in the context of contemporary unconventional extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on the impacts of public capital stocks on economic growth has generally used either national macroeconomic or multijurisdictional regional data. This study attempts to contribute to this area of the discipline by using time series data for a single metropolitan economy. To allow for both short-run and long-run effects, an error-correction modeling framework is used for the empirical analysis. Because comprehensive public infrastructure stocks are not published for El Paso, Texas, estimates for those variables are calculated using information regarding annual public capital investment data. Estimation results indicate that physical infrastructure investment may disrupt short-run economic growth but does improve long-run metropolitan economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their establishment, city-level economic development corporations in Texas have grown in popularity as an ostensible means of providing for economic development. However, one knows little about the association between these economic development entities and the economic vitality of the areas they serve. Using a 2005-2006 survey of city leaders in Texas, along with Census data for 304 Texas cities, the authors investigate the association between the use of economic development corporations and the level of local unemployment. Results of the analysis indicate that economic development corporations have a reliable association with lower levels of unemployment; however, the activities of these entities matter. Lower levels of community employment are associated with activities that focus on industrial development. In contrast, the authors find no reliable relationship between the level of city unemployment and economic development corporations that engage in quality of life activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]