Central banking in the United States has a long and controversial history dating back to the earliest days of the republic. One of the most widely presented arguments against a central bank has been that the U.S. Constitution does not expressly grant the federal government power to charter a bank. Recently, this issue has received new scrutiny in…

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama's plan for teacher education reform and improvement was described in the document "Our Future, Our Teachers" (2011). The rationale for reform is that "many of our teacher preparation programs fall short" (p. 5). The measures of this are stated as "only 23% of…

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address. Fredric Jameson's concepts of cognitive mapping, cultural revolution, and the unconscious are employed to examine the president's vision of educational and economic transformation. Ultimately, it is argued this vision evokes a world in which…

The Labor government in Australia has recently embarked on an extremely ambitious program of social inclusion for the most marginalized groups in society. Drawing upon the approach of "policy scholarship" this paper examines some federal government "policy texts" to describe what has occurred and asks questions about what is…

This paper estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on adult health outcomes and educational attainment. I utilize an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a change in the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states. Identification is achieved…

Academic corruption in China's higher education institutions has become a serious issue in the last decade. This paper provides a critical discussion of the Chinese Ministry of Education's policy developments aimed to strengthen academic ethics and control academic corruption. It suggests that while the reactions of policy-makers to the apparent…

In the winter of 2009, with more than 1.4 million job losses in the first two months of the year, the federal government passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law as a way to quickly inject liquidity into a stalling economy and maintain critical services that would allow individuals and communities to survive through the…

On November 3, 2010, a site team from the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) and the U.S. Department of Education conducted a visit to National Defense University's (University) School for Information Resources Management (IRMC or iCollege) at Ft. McNair in Washington, DC. The purpose of the visit was to…

As Secretary Arne Duncan recognizes, turning around schools that are not doing well is a formidable task. It is also a task about which many ambiguities and controversies swirl. Given all the uncertainties associated with turning around, transforming, and continuously improving schools, it is essential to keep analyzing deficiencies in blueprints…

Performing the review and assessment of masters' level degree programs can be an overwhelming and challenging endeavor. Getting organized and mapping out the entire review and assessment process can be extremely helpful and more importantly provide a path for successfully accomplishing the review and assessment of the entire program. This paper…

Unfortunately, high schools are an afterthought in Title I, the federal government's primary source of support for educating low-income students. Only 10 percent of Title I funding supports high school students, while high schools educate almost one-fourth of the nation's low-income students. Nearly 1,300 high-poverty high schools are not even…

This report argues that this is a promising time for entrepreneurs and developers to enter the adult learning market. Economic and labor trends are applying unprecedented pressure on policymakers to think differently. Federal, and in turn state, policies are shifting. The adaptation of K-12 and postsecondary education technologies (ed-tech) to the…

In the fall of 2009, the President asked his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) to develop specific recommendations concerning the most important actions that the administration should take to ensure that the United States is a leader in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education in the coming…

In the 1990s, most US states adopted new forms of performance-based accountability, e.g., performance-based budgeting, funding, or reporting. This study analyzed changes in institutional performance following the adoption of these new accountability standards. We measured institutional performance by representative education and research…

This report is part of a series of reports that provides information on the structure, function, finances, taxation, employment, and pension systems of the United States' approximately 90,000 state and local governments. This report presents data on state and local government employment and payroll based on information collected by the 2013 Annual…