LeoNora M. Cohen is an emeritus associate professor in the College of Education at Oregon State University. She began the Mentally Gifted Program for Philadelphia Schools, founded the Conceptual Foundations Network of the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC), and initiated theory summits to bring together theorists from around the world…

Women aspiring to be principals and superintendents in the U.S. public school system have little information concerning optimum career paths to leadership. This article considers recent research and theory regarding career planning in the context of K-12 schools, and the different approaches adopted by male and female aspirants. The choice of…

Federal special education and accountability policies requires that educators individualize instruction for students with disabilities, while simultaneously ensuring that the vast majority of these students meet age-based grade-level standards and assessment targets. In this paper, we examine this dynamic interplay between policies through…

Background/Context: Educational researchers have long sought to understand the factors that enable or constrain persistence in non-formal family literacy and adult education programs. Scholars typically posit three sets of factors influencing persistence: situational (learners' life circumstances), institutional (programmatic factors), and…

Researchers have investigated the impact of teacher education and experience on child care quality; however, findings have been inconsistent. This study used archived data originating from Pennsylvania's Keystone STARS program. The sample included 617 infant or toddler classrooms with 1356 teachers and 887 preschool classrooms with 1915 teachers.…

The Academy of Philadelphia (today known as the University of Pennsylvania), founded through Benjamin Franklin's influence in 1751, and the Dessau Philanthropine, founded by Johann Bernhard Basedow in 1774, were arguably the first non-denominational schools in the eighteenth century. Yet, the congenial educational ideas of their founders have…

One purpose of this paper was to describe the present process of machine government and private-regarding practices in local school government. Another purpose was to theorize from these data, based on selected conceptual notions, about the political process in educational governance. Data for the study came from a Pennsylvania superintendent…

Examines the quality of teaching offered at the Hutterian kindergarten school in New Meadow Run, Pennsylvania, as an example of an outdoor school. Suggests that, based on the ideas of Rousseau, Pestallozzi, and Froebel on early play and natural development, outdoor schools can offer an alternative to current structured academic school activities…

A research project that developed methods for describing, organizing, analyzing, and predicting state education policy activity had as its major focus the way that values affect that policy. Data were drawn from six states: Wisconsin, Illinois, California, Arizona, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They were chosen to represent ranges of political…

The following are among 50 papers included: "The Politics of Planning Culturally Relevant AIDS Education for African-American Women" (Archie-Booker); "Developing White Consciousness through a Transformative Learning Process" (Barlas); "Executive Businesswomen's Learning in the Context of Organizational Culture"…