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.…

Over the past 4 years, rain barrel programming for residents has been implemented in both Northern Virginia and New Jersey as a method for educating the public about stormwater management and water conservation. Program participants demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge of water resource issues. Follow-up surveys showed 58% of New…

Teacher educators have an obligation to prepare preservice teachers with the skills and dispositions necessary to promote a socially just world. Yet the results of this study uncovered that the majority of elementary preservice teachers in a national sample (N = 846) have a simplistic perception of good citizenship consistent with what Westheimer…

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…

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…

The rise of state-mandated standards in public education have allowed legislators to answer the question of what constitutes a proper civic education, a debate that has existed in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century. Through the content they employ in their standards, states may indirectly influence the type of citizenship…

The landmark Civic Mission of Schools report of 2003 laid out an argument for the role of schools in promoting youth civic engagement and presented a range of promising ideas and practices to accomplish that. In this study we describe the civic engagement outcomes that a large, diverse urban school district has chosen to promote in its students.…

This article examines the educational leadership of the first African American female principal in Richmond, Virginia: Mrs. Ethel Thompson Overby. It seeks to ascertain, through a historical framework utilizing critical race theory, how this particular educational and instructional leader conceptualized academic achievement given the context of…

The purpose of this research is to employ a theoretical perspective to better understand and recognize the role of institutional culture within the civic responsibility movement in higher education. A three-part conceptual framework (Swidler, 1986) is used to investigate the influence of culture on civic responsibility at two research…

This study examined the civic outcomes of the Sustained Dialogue model. Qualitative interviews investigated the perceived impacts of dialogue experience on post-graduate civic life, generating an inventory of 29 dialogue civic outcomes across five domains: 1) cognitions, 2) behaviors, 3) attitudes 4) skills, and 5) hopes and plans for the future.…

Student citizenship development is an important goal of higher education that is rarely considered through a cultural lens. This ethnographic study of a research university is an examination of campus ideologies and cultural forms that address five dimensions of civic responsibility. The findings illustrate how the beliefs and cultural equipment…

This paper discusses instructional objectives in middle school social studies programs in Virginia. Undertaken in response to a concern that middle school objectives were largely unsettled despite a significant amount of research, this study aimed at clarifying objectives by investigating Virginia social studies educators' professional positions…