"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…

Against the backdrop of urban school politics, in which mayors play increasingly powerful and pivotal roles, the current study examines the origins and implications of mayoral control of charter school authorization and accountability in Indianapolis (see Henig & Rich, 2004; Wong & Shen, 2007). In contrast to analyses of mayoral takeovers…

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…

Examination of Indiana state legislators' dependence on various mass media and interpersonal sources for information about their constituents reveals a relatively stable use of mass communication sources and a surprising role for radio. Tenure apparently is unrelated to information search for situations examined in this study. (Author/MBR)

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…

Following an assessment of need among state and local public administrators in Indiana, Internet workshops were organized at Indiana State University and offered to state administrators, judges, and legislators. Each workshop began Friday morning and included a lecture-demonstration on the Internet System. After lunch participants each worked at a…

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…

The 2006 Public Opinion Survey on Education in Indiana gauged the attitudes and perceptions of a representative sample of Hoosiers on such key educational issues as kindergarten and pre-kindergarten programs, No Child Left Behind and P.L. 221, school funding and taxes, teacher quality, school choice and charter schools, and the achievement gap in…

A report based on a conference on the impact of cost information on statewide budgeting and planning is presented. The conference was organized around case-study reports on the use of cost information in higher education budgeting in Florida, Indiana, Washington, and Wisconsin. Rather than publishing convention proceedings, the case studies were…