Current Public School Research Articles

The Crisis of Michigan’s Public School Funding and Its Influence on Human Resources Management

Human resource management (HRM), particularly within urban public school districts, cannot generate adequate resources to compensate for inflation and cannot offer adequate instructional programs similar to those found in larger districts, resulting in inequity in educational opportunities. Studies have emphasized the importance of staffing schools with quality teachers, as this has the greatest effect on student achievement. School district HRM units with high-percentage Black and under-resourced (free and reduced-priced lunch) students are challenged with recruiting, retaining, and compensating highly effective and diverse educators. The challenge is reflected in outcomes such as teacher turnover rates in Michigan’s under-resourced districts and districts serving high percentages of Black students. This study sought to explain Michigan’s historical and current public school funding structures that exasperate Black and under-resourced districts’ HRM pressures, utilizing the integrated tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and critical policy analysis (CPA) to understand how history has affected policy creation and implementation of funding. This study applied select tenets of CRT and CPA through quantitative analysis of school funding to determine the extent of the impact on HRM seeking to staff schools.

US principals’ sensemaking of the future roles and responsibilities of school principals

School principals are fundamentally important to school improvement. Due in part to this importance, the roles and responsibilities of school principals are constantly evolving. To explore leader sensemaking about this phenomenon I conducted 30 interviews with 10 public school principals in the US state of New Jersey during the 2018–2019 school year. Specifically, in this study I asked: (a) What are current public school principals’ predictions of the future role of school principals? and (b) In what way(s) do these predictions shape principals’ thinking about remaining in the profession? The findings of this work indicate: (a) principals believe the future of the school principal will focus heavily on safety and security; (b) principals believe the future of the role will include an increased emphasis on supporting student and teacher emotion and mental health; and (c) principals believe their future role as a school leader will evolve in how they interact with parents/guardians. Finally, an analysis of data shows in some cases how principals make sense of the future of the profession shapes their thinking about remaining in or exiting the role of school principal. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

School accountability and standard-based education reform: The recall of social efficiency movement and scientific management

This study examines issues of success/failure, performance, and effectiveness in the contemporary reform discourses of school accountability. It pays attention to a particular meaning of success/failure and its implications for current public school systems and education reform movements, not merely as a school accountability issue, but as an ontological one, which is inscribed in the politics of inclusion and exclusion. The mechanisms of standardization, classification, and normalization embedded in the practices of high-stakes testing are reconsidered through an analysis of the discussion of social efficiency in the early twentieth century. The study also examines its recall several decades later as part of the quality control and management of individuals, schools, and states. In exploring connectedness between the old and new levels of social efficiency, this study suggests that success/failure becomes reinscribed as a particular system of reasoning to normalize the subjectivity in discourses of the current American education reform and OECD’s PISA. The study concludes by criticizing the rationale of recent educational reforms based on the search for past and present social efficiency movements in schools.

Children’s perceptions of their experiences in early learning environments: An exploration of power and hierarchy

This qualitative study explores five children’s perspectives of their experiences in both a university laboratory school and in their current public school setting. The perceptions of the children, aged between 4 and 6, provide innovative and significant information on how early childhood education is being realised in Ontario, Canada, as the government’s full-day kindergarten curriculum is being fully implemented across the province. Children express their thoughts and opinions on their learning through semi-structured conversations and child-produced drawings. Employing the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, critical pedagogy and a child rights–based perspective as theoretical frameworks, an overarching theme of power and hierarchy is established throughout the children’s descriptions of their experiences in their current public elementary school setting. More specifically, this central theme of power and hierarchy, and how it is realised in classroom environments in order to regulate and control children, is explored through the children’s descriptions of space, pedagogical practice, rules, and their decision-making and influence on curriculum.

A Distributist Approach to the Upcoming Financial Crisis and Its Effect on Education: Michigan as a Case Study

This paper examines the potential problems and solutions that could arise within the public education system when the federal and state governments make budget cuts because of their high levels of debt and the fiscal gap (difference between revenues and expenditures). The paper uses Michigan as a case study and examines its laws about dissolving school districts, the current state of Michigan schools (ten percent of Michigan schools began the 2013-2014 school year with a deficit), and the finances of Michigan’s state government. The solutions addressed include granting more local control to run the schools (Distributism), looking at homeschooling and private schools for solutions, adopting parent-run schools, and enacting parent trigger laws.One solution is to adopt the economic philosophy of Distributism, which argues that public schools could be more effectively run on the local level. Parents and students best understand what they as individuals need to become more educated. They recognize the specific problems affecting individual students and are better able to decide how to help these students. Officials at the state and federal level do not have a grasp of the problems affecting individual students; they can only apply broad solutions that may be harmful or unhelpful to individuals or groups of students. Therefore, granting more control to parents, students and local officials may encourage solutions that are useful to those specific students in each locale and thereby improve the education system overall in a piecemeal manner.In addition, the paper analyzes how homeschooling and private schools are able to educate children for a smaller cost than the current public school system. The paper studies how parent-run schools in England operate and allow parents to have primary control over their children’s education. The paper examines solutions that give parents and students more control, such as how parent trigger laws in four states allow parents to fire the school staff in failing schools and replace them with staff the parents choose. As the parties that are most affected by a child’s education, parents and children have the most interest in ensuring that students receive an excellent education and are the best party to decide how to improve student education.The paper concludes that local control of the education system offers the best option for improving the education of America’s youth while at the same time operating on a smaller, more efficient budget.

A History of Sex Education in the United States since 1900

We provide a historical perspective toward the current public school practices of American sex education. The primary time frames include the progressive era (1880–1920), intermediate era (1920–1960), the sexual revolution era (1960s and 1970s), and the modern sex education era (1980s to the present). In each period, we highlight key developments that affect educators’ current decision making as public sex education continues to develop and morph in the context of contemporary society. We show that an apt understanding of sex education's past is critical for making prudent decisions about its future.

The Old Deluder, Educational Salvation, and the Limits of Distributive Justice

The first piece of educational legislation in the American colonies divides neatly into two parts: a local school funding policy that is familiar as the basis of current public school funding in the United States; and a preamble that identifies Satan as the enemy of the community and the justification for common schools. In this article, the author explores the relationship between a public enemy and public schools in the United States, demonstrating the continued influence of the Old Deluder Satan Act even as the relationship it proposes between access to schools and educational salvation has unraveled. While the Puritans based their distributive model of schooling on the formative power of the divine, the formative task of contemporary schooling remains dimly defined. In order to address the formative function of schooling, the author turns to Robbie McClintock's concept of ‘formative justice’ as a possible supplement to discussions of distribution.

Effect of Time Spent in Charter Schools on Student Test Scores: A Michigan Case Study

ABSTRACT In response to concerns about the efficacy of the U.S. education system, a number of school reforms have been attempted. This article briefly presents an argument explaining why the current public school system will not efficiently produce educational services and the role of charter schools in improving public school efficiency. It then examines empirically, for a set of charter schools managed by National Heritage Academies (NHA), the effect of time spent at school as a measure of value added in the educational process. The finding is that for NHA schools, time spent has a statistically significant positive effect on test scores.

Psychosocial Development of the Gifted: Implications for a Counseling Intervention for Gifted Students

Traditional approaches to the education of gifted children and youth have focused on cognitive dimensions, with a program emphasis of enriched and accelerated education, providing services in special classes, special schools, and in the regular classroom. In the current public school environment in the United States, considerable attention is being placed on raising standards and testing students. No piece of educational legislation in the past decade has stirred as much comment and controversy as the No Child Left Behind Act that includes a mandate for an extensive testing program across major subject areas (Gallagher, 2004). Academic success and cognitive development have become the focus of educational programs, especially for gifted students. Gifted students feel pressure to succeed; consequently, their emotional and social development is being neglected by the school (Fleith, 2001). This paper examines the critical importance of developing the emotional, social and personal self of the exceptional child who needs to understand the intensities and challenges of functioning fully as a gifted person. The paper includes a summary of the essential counseling interventions for Gifted students.

Renew! Take a break in kindergarten

A university child development/early childhood education professor renews her relationship with young children and with current public school teaching by spending 5 weeks in kindergarten. This article describes some highlights of her experience: the children's daily journal writing, an in‐class and take‐home math activity, and teaching the required kindergarten social studies unit on Antarctica. The experience provided renewal for the professor and fresh examples for the professor to share with her university students.

State University Roles in the Charter School Movement

As charter schools proliferate, public universities are increasingly called on to support them in various capacities. The authors consider how universities might best meet the challenges of ensuring that charter schools deliver a high-quality education to their students. The charter school movement has taken the country by storm, leaving in its wake 33 state laws allowing parents, educators, or entrepreneurs to create independent schools that are publicly funded but free from many state and local regulations.1 SINCE AMY Stuart Wells and her colleagues wrote those words in 1998, at least six more states have approved charter school legislation, well over 500 new charter schools have opened, and more than a quarter million additional students have begun attending charter schools. In the fall of 2000, more than 300,000 students attended 2,048 charter schools. By September 2002, there were 2,695 operating charter schools in the U.S., serving just over 684,000 students, with nearly 70 new schools scheduled to open by the fall of 2003.2 Undoubtedly, Wells' metaphorical description of the charter school movement continues to reflect accurately the scope and speed of this national movement. In spite of their numbers and growing popularity, we know very little about charter schools -- about the ways they are organized and managed, their methods of operating, or their impacts on educators, families, and students. Furthermore, the research base that policy makers might access to help them identify particularly promising charter school proposals remains disappointingly thin. As states continue to expand their involvement with charter schools, state universities are in the unique position of choosing from a variety of potential roles they may play and responsibilities they may fill in this process. Our purpose in this article is to begin to examine the options by which public universities -- and particularly their schools and colleges of education -- can most effectively and appropriately contribute to the charter school process in their states. Since the first such school opened in Minnesota in 1992, the charter school movement in the U.S. has grown with astounding speed. This growth results from a number of factors, not the least of which is the more general national interest in the issue of providing parents with greater choice in their children's education. In order to understand the roles that state universities may play in the charter school movement, it is important to consider the context in which charter schools are developing and the broader societal trend toward school choice. The U.S. Department of Education defines charter schools as follows: Charter schools are public schools, but what sets them apart is their charter -- a contract with a state or local agency that provides them with public funds for a specified time period. The charter itself states the terms under which the school can be held accountable for improving student performance and achieving goals set out in the charter. This contract frees charter developers from a number of regulations that otherwise apply to public schools.3 Some observers see charter schools as a sort of middle ground between creating options within the current public school system and adopting the more radical choice proposals that include nonpublic schools. Charter schools are, in effect, public schools that are allowed to operate much like private schools. As such, they are both similar to and distinct from traditional public-public approaches (e.g., magnet schools) and the more dramatic public-private approaches (e.g., vouchers for private school enrollment). It may be this sense of balancing between the extremes that explains the surprising progress of the movement in little more than a decade and the widely diverse political support it has received. Perhaps because it is a compromise between two passionately supported approaches, the charter school movement presents state universities with an unusual and uncomfortable set of expectations. …

Do Dollars Make a Difference? The Relationship between Expenditures and Test Scores in Pennsylvania's Public Schools

For the past three decades it has been evident that the quality of public schools in the United States has been on the decline. Whether measured empirically against the systems of other countries or judged anecdotally by employers who believe today's high school graduates do not have the skills requisite for even entry-level work, it becomes clear there is something wrong with the current public school system. The education establishment claims the problem is a lack of funding, while many tax payer groups claim more money is not the answer. This study uses data from each of Pennsylvania's 501 school districts to look at the relationship between funding and achievement while controlling for the economic background of each school's student population, as well as other organizational characteristics.

Deconstructing Differences in African-American and European-American Adolescents’ Perspectives on U.S. History

Recent proposals for reforming the K–12 history curriculum have recommended revising the traditional narrative on U.S. history by including the historical experiences of diverse racial groups. The proposals, however, have not considered the historical perspectives that young people bring to historical inquiry. After reviewing contemporary frameworks for teaching U.S. history in public schools, I present data from one teacher’s history classes that demonstrate that African-American and European-American adolescents constructed different explanations of significant actors, events, and themes in U.S. history. The two groups also constructed conflicting beliefs about the credibility of secondary historical sources. Representative of more substantive differences in the perspectives that the adolescents brought to historical inquiry, the differences in adolescents’ historical understandings arose from race-related differences in the lived experiences of the adolescents themselves and their family members. Given these findings, I point out the limitations of current public school history curricular frameworks and draw on contemporary scholarship to propose a curricular framework which takes into account the differences in historical perspectives constructed by the African-American and European- American students in this study.

Primary grade student reports for teacher evaluation

The improvement of teacher evaluation is an important theme in current public school reform efforts. One change, suggested by a number of researchers, is to gather more lines of evidence or perspectives of teacher performance for decision making. Student views, commonly used in higher education, are advocated as one data source about teacher quality. Although it is clear that students of all ages can provide some perspective on teacher performance, substantial questions remain about using the views of young pupils. The purpose of this study was to empirically examine a sample of student reports of teacher performance from kindergarten through second grade. The analysis used procedures developed for student rating forms in higher education. The objective was to advance understanding and practice about effective teacher evaluation, specifically in the use of pupil report data.

A mainstream preschool program: Working model in rural Maine

Recent permissive legislation in Maine now provides state subsidy for preschool special education programs in public schools. As a result, there has been heightened interest and incentive to develop preschool program models which can be integrated effectively and economically, into current public school systems. This article will describe the development and implementation process of a model preschool program in Richmond, a rural Maine community. There is particular emphasis on identifying practical considerations for those who may be interested in addressing similar service delivery concerns.

The Right to Educate

Many observers and critics of current public school practices have advocated that parents be given more control over their children's education. On the other hand, the suggestion has sometimes been voiced that children-particularly those from disadvantaged families-be removed from their own parents and reared in public nurseries. Admittedly the latter suggestion is distasteful, even shocking, to most of us; yet it is doubtful whether our emotional revulsion to this suggestion is accompanied by any rational considerations. So great is our commitment to the nuclear family, that the idea of removing children from their natural parents seems utterly alien to everything we believe and hold dear. But, as with other deep, personal commitments, once we begin to search for solid, rational grounds upon which such a commitment might be defended, if not based, we find ourselves floundering in deep and troubled waters.' It is unlikely that our society would ever seriously consider forc

A Linguist's View of the Current Public School Controversy

A Linguist's View of the Current Public School Controversy