Amid the growth of charter schools, autonomous schools, and private management organizations, an increasing number of urban districts are moving toward a portfolio management model (PMM). In a PMM, the district central office oversees schools that operate under a variety of governance models. The expansion of PMMs raises questions about local…

American public higher education is in trouble. Besieged by declining state and Federal support for more than 30 years, public colleges and universities are facing a "game-changing" set of challenges that threaten to alter the very nature of the institutions. As two recessions withered state budgets in the first decade of the 21st…

In this article, the author, founder of Yorktown University, an online institution whose focus is training for citizenship, describes the often circuitous path to higher education accreditation. The author's story of what happened on his way to reform higher education is a tale of the political ability of traditional institutions to block startup…

This study examines and chronicles the change in public funding for postsecondary education in Colorado from 1970 to 2010. Colorado was ranked sixth among states in per capita funding for public higher education in 1970 and declined to 48th in 2010. The study analyzed state appropriations over this time period in five broad categories of spending:…

In this article we introduce and explain a funding framework for advancing an equity agenda at the community college. The need for the framework is premised on (a) Dowd's observation that the traditional community college commitment to student access no longer suffices as an adequate strategy to achieve greater equity in society and (b) the…