For many high school students, the benefits of civic education seem irrelevant and take place in their future lives. Student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Civics is stagnant. In 2018, the average civics score for eighth-grade students was not significantly different from 2014 and had only increased by 3…

This paper concerns a virtual exchange project between the University of Virginia (UVa), United States, and an upper-secondary school in Pavia, Italy. Centred on the question of gender equality, the project has been designed to take place over three years (2018-2021) with a direct reference to Robert O'Dowd's transnational model of virtual…

We apply a utilization-focused evaluation [UFE] approach to an evaluation of Virginia's latest comprehensive accountability policy--the Standards of Accreditation (SOA). Our study focuses on the implementation experiences of district and high school level administrators in four urban districts. This study is significant in two important ways.…

John Dewey said that "democracy needs to be reborn in each generation and education is its midwife." While there has been criticism of the Bush administration's post-9/11 agenda, there is little recognition of the role that his education policy played to rebirth democracy for a nation in crisis. This paper analyzes the ways that 9/11 has…

This content analysis explored how Civics and Government textbooks and the Virginia Standards of Learning for Civics and Government courses reflect citizenship outcomes, specifically deconstructing the unique needs of marginalized students. The coding frame was constructed by using themes and categories from previous literature, specifically…

By coincidence or not, Massachusetts, Illinois and Virginia created civic education task forces not long after national test results showed a dismal understanding of the subject matter across all grade levels. Results of the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed just 25 percent of all testtakers in grades 4, 8 and 12 demonstrated…

The term democracy has an overwhelmingly positive connotation for most people (Diamond & Plattner, 2008), yet it is a contested, fluid, and evolving concept that represents many different things to different people. This article presents our analysis of conceptions of democracy among groups of adolescents (n = 2,848, ages 13-19) in the Czech…

Over the past 15 months, the Virginia Board of Education has been redesigning its public school students' high school educational experience to better prepare them to participate in the global economy. To lay the groundwork for this redesign, the Profile of a Graduate was developed. The profile in turn grew out of a broader review of Virginia's…

An emergent research base suggests that teacher perceptions of fairness with respect to interactions with school administrators, decision-making processes, and decision outcomes have much to contribute to our understanding of effective schools. This study focused on the relationship between organizational justice and organizational citizenship…

Newport News is a city of 193,000 people, located between Williamsburg and Norfolk in Southeastern Virginia. Newport News Public Schools (NNPS) educates approximately 30,500 children, grades Pre-K to 12, of whom 55.7% are Black, 29% are White, 9.9% are Hispanic, 2.9% are Asian, and 2.5% are other races. Newport News Public Schools' (NNPS') Special…

Decision cases have been used in the United States for higher education in agriculture and natural resources, as well as in extension education. Few cases have been developed for secondary education audiences and fewer yet for both secondary and higher education applications. This case was developed for use in both secondary- and university-level…