Describes New York's charter-school legislation; explains charter-school responsibilities at state department of education and local boards of education; includes the development of the application form; discusses how state and local agencies shape charter schools through the application-review process. (PKP)

Discusses the many contributions of Rewey Belle Inglis, a secondary English teacher, university English educator, and textbook publisher, as well as first woman president of the National Council of Teachers of English (1929). Discusses her professional credentials, her place in history, her writings (about teaching grammar and literature, teacher…

Moves away from a discussion of crisis management to reflect on vulnerabilities and strengths of communication departments in the larger university. Considers the general strengths and weaknesses of communication departments in the context of thinking about the reasons for the University of Nebraska Lincoln's vulnerability to budget cutting and…

Four conceptions of and approaches to systemic change are statewide, districtwide, schoolwide, and ecological. State and district approaches value expert opinion and narrow groups of stakeholders. School-level approaches value school autonomy. An ecological systems approach values broad, meaningful participation and the change process itself. (SK)

Considers the opinions about the communication department as perceived by the author's colleagues both from the communication department and from other departments. Reflects his academic inferiority complex in response to those opinions. Suggests a return to more a basic, primordial attitude--one which demands "continuity and change," but which…

In this forum, eleven authors address the implications of the national Standards for foreign language learning for language and literature departments in higher education. (Author/VWL)

The department chair is one of the most challenging positions in higher education. Advancing one's department can occur by attending to the parameters that highly successful organizations have implemented. In addition to outlining the challenges of serving as a department chair, this article describes four requirements for dealing with, and…

To address the need of identifying a comprehensive base for the critical issues and problems, research was conducted to ascertain the perspectives of classroom teachers, university professors, and supervisors of technology education. The goal of the research was to determine the critical issues and problems based on the following two questions:…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is not going away. In fact, it might not even undergo more than minor modifications before it comes up for reauthorization in a couple of years. The nomination of Margaret Spellings to replace Rod Paige as U.S. secretary of education foretells not only a single-minded focus on test-based accountability but also an…

Most means of differentiating higher education institutions emphasize their structural characteristics: faculty size; highest and kind of degree granted; level of external support; size of endowment; number of students; average board scores; admissions selectivity; tuition; and so on. In this article, the author offers a view of differentiating…

The PhD dissertation is the ultimate educational product. It reflects the training of its author and the technical, analytical, and writing skills he or she developed in a doctoral program. Successful completion of the dissertation and the award of the PhD certify that the degree recipient can do independent scholarly work. That much is generally…

An increasingly important performance measure for university administrators is mean time to graduation at the department level. In this study, the authors examined whether a student's major is a significant variable in predicting time to graduate. If students in one major take much longer to graduate than do those in another major, administrators…

A growing body of literature suggests that when schools become professional communities there are expected benefits in terms of teacher learning, school improvement and student achievement. In this article the concept of professional communities is examined for certain subject departments in Dutch secondary schools. The authors report on research…

The role of a department chair is difficult and complex because it requires one to be an instructor, an administrator, a leader, a manager, and a mediator simultaneously. With the present budget constraints, effective internal leadership at the department level has become indispensable for community colleges. Despite the fact that department…

This essay explores some of the conflicts faced by the author, a liaison with book-selection responsibilities to a university English Department. These conflicts include: trying to fill gaps missed by profiles set up with our book vendor; trying to achieve a reasonable balance between canonical and non-canonical texts; between primary texts and…