Research has demonstrated the wide-ranging and positive benefits from high-quality publicly-funded prekindergarten education. Yet, access for families with young children remains uneven, with significant gaps across geography, income, race, and ethnicity. Over the last few decades, many states have worked to broaden access to prekindergarten…

Next generation accountability systems can empower states, districts, communities, and schools with timely, relevant information and provide the capacity to analyze and continuously improve instruction and learning. After 21 years of the current accountability framework in federal and state policy in the United States, there is growing recognition…

The article explains the limited presence of geography in New England higher education as a result of the structure of the region's higher education system. Blending the geography and history of education literatures, it identifies type of control (public vs. private), institution type, urban location, multi-campus university systems, and the weak…

Borrowing from Yale School of Management, we call this new approach the raw case method of learning. Unlike a traditional case study, a raw case is not confined in print or pages of a narrative about a challenging international business situation. It is an open, real-time information space through which case study students may wander. But it also…

On Dec. 21, 2020, Congress lifted the 26-year ban on federal student aid--specifically, the Pell grant--for those who are incarcerated. The decision came after a long push for prison reforms that included calls for a greater emphasis on rehabilitation, reducing prison populations, and making prison sentences less harsh. New England has long been a…

European physicians long worried that the scholarly life was harmful to health. Neurological and digestive problems flowed from sedentary, seated lives. In the late eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment began spreading education to more people, educators inspired by Rousseau's "Emile" such as Johann Guts Muths, Friedrich Jahn,…

The National Writing Project (NWP) has contributed enormously and consistently to the effort to help teachers help students learn to write. In the early 1970s, researchers such as Donald Graves and Janet Emig began studying the ways writers go about the task of thinking and producing polished writing. The NWP's book "Because Writing…

Higher education organizations need to support trans students' use of self-identified first names (in place of legal names given at birth) and self-identified pronouns (in place of assumed pronouns based sex assigned at birth of other's perceptions of physical appearance), but the literature provides little guidance on how best to do so. This…

Operating as the center of student life, college unions have a central role to teach citizenship, social responsibility, and leadership. Unions can serve as locations for education and conversations about sustainability, as well as for organizations operationally and programmatically engaged in sustainable practices. In this chapter, the authors…

Connecticut College for Women and its Progressive Era sister colleges (Douglass, Simmons, Skidmore, and William Smith) are distinctive for the prominent vocational and service elements each college had in its original mission and curriculum. Historians however have often left Connecticut College for Women out of the story of American women's…

This article examines the legal and political significance of teacher unionization in rural and suburban school districts between 1960 and 1975. While most historians focus on the growth of unions in urban areas, strikes in outlying districts played a determinative role in the development of public sector labor law, particularly in the arbitration…

This dissertation examines the formation, reformation, and standardization of land-grant colleges in the Northeastern United States during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. It is a history that explores the turbulent origins of land-grant colleges in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont,…

Vermont's education system in 2006 consists of 311 schools (buildings) in Vermont and 284 school districts led by school boards that vary in size from three to 14 members, totaling over 1,300 elected school board members operating a school system that serves about 95,000 students. There is a clear delineation between the superintendent's role in a…