"Getting poor kids out of failing schools" sounds like an altruistic cause most Americans support. However, one policy mechanism utilized to achieve that result, parental choice vouchers, has a checkered past. This descriptive analysis explores the policy-bubble created when state legislators eschewed their constitutional responsibility…

The economic meltdown has hit U.S. college campuses, and higher education is on the chopping block in state budgets, with cuts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars already approved and hundreds of millions in more cuts on the way. As veteran legislators, the authors have seen this story play out before in previous recessions. The mindset on…

The new class of governors, state legislators, and chief state school officers elected last week will face formidable challenges in dealing with the squeeze the nation's sagging economy--and ballooning state budget deficits--is putting on K-12 education. In the November 4 elections, Democrats added one more governor's office--in Missouri--to their…

A study examined how statehouse reporters covering the 1982 session of the Indiana General Assembly used information sources. Specifically, it focused on reporter reliance on key senate leaders, on the visibility of those senators in published stories, and on the institutional images transmitted in stories in which those and other senators were…

Data gathered in a study of news coverage of the parttime Indiana and fulltime Michigan state legislatures were used to determine if source use in stories, portrayals of lawmakers and of the legislature as a whole, and topic coverage varied with the length of the legislative session. A content analysis was conducted of the 111 stories written by…

Reporters' perceived concern for their editors' news priorities and their own role self-concepts were examined for their effects on how reporters covering the Indiana State Assembly used diverse sources of information. Subjects, 34 reporters and 39 state senators, were surveyed concerning their contacts with each other during the 1982 legislative…