Strategic planning is critical to ensuring that institutions of higher education thoughtfully and systematically position themselves to accomplish their mission, vision, and strategic goals, particularly when these institutions face a myriad of risks that can negatively impact their continued financial viability and compromise their ability to…

Sooner or later, every teacher and administrator fantasizes about starting a school of their own. Few, however, move from off-the-cuff theory to the practical steps required to open the school house doors to real students and teachers. Fewer still manage to start an urban high school of their own while only in their mid-30s, a school that manages…

In cultural historical activity theory, the entities that make a system are not conceived as independent but as aspects of mediated relations. Consequently, an individual, a tool, or a community cannot be theorized in an independent manner but must be understood in terms of the historically changing, mediated relations in which they are integral…

This paper explores whether phenomenology, in general, and the case of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's phenomenological optics in particular, provides a case and a location for "minimal realism," located between the extreme positions of absolute scientific realists and "radical rhetoricians." The paper begins with a description of…

The study reported in this document was conducted to identify, describe, and assess the potential of innovative approaches to integrating vocational and academic education as one way of helping students to understand the utility of academic learning. Research activities included case studies of five integrated-curriculum programs in California,…

Reviews political science literature on changing state politics. A statistical analysis focuses on the relationship between changing legislative structures and higher education for all 50 states. Presents a case study of Pennsylvania that suggests a possible causal relationship between changing political structure and limitation of public…

New economic strategies used by states are described, and case studies of the recent innovations in economic development policies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are presented. A number of programs in other states are briefly reviewed, and various models of state intervention are evaluated, along with the principles that underlie…

Case study of a poor, rural Pennsylvania school district's experience with the Reading First initiative illustrates how the No Child Left Behind Act confines districts to a few federally prescribed, "scientifically proven" curricula that ignore local conditions. Sanctioned schools are negatively labeled but receive inadequate funding,…