Support Of Public Schools Research Articles

The Role of Punjab Public School Support Program in Enhancement of Enrollment

The Role of Punjab Public School Support Program in Enhancement of Enrollment

The Role of Punjab Public School Support Program in Enhancement of Infrastructure Facilities

The Role of Punjab Public School Support Program in Enhancement of Infrastructure Facilities

The Role of Punjab Public School Support Ptogram in Enhancement of Tecahers’ Competencies

The Enhancement of Teachers competencies in PEIMA-financially supported PSSP schools in the Mianwali area was the main focus of the current study. Survey constructed as intended and quantitative methodology used. The study's goals were to investigate any shortcomings in PSSP schools receiving assistance from PEIMA and to monitor the improvement of Teachers competencies in these schools. The study's population consisted of all the male and female primary schools in the district of Mianwali that were founded in the public sector and funded by the Punjab Education Initiative Management Authority under the PSSP mode. Seven hypotheses and five research questions were developed. 110 instructors and 33 principals made up the study's sample. The tool was a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire created by the researcher. Test of Validity & Reliability and Pilot testing were done before administering the instrument. This study can help the concerned authorities and implementing partners to consider study findings for recruitment & selection, training & development, performance appraisal, succession planning & infrastructure facilities, and academic achievement of the student and teacher's competencies.

The Effect of Biology Teaching Materials on the Academic Performance of Senior Secondary School Students in Ilorin West, Ilorin, Kwara State

This study examined the impact of Biology instructional materials on the academic performance of senior secondary school students in Ilorin West LGA, Kwara State, Nigeria. It employed a descriptive survey research design and targeted Biology students in senior secondary schools. A random sampling technique was used to select 120 students. Data was collected using a questionnaire and analyzed using frequency count, percentage, mean, standard deviation, independent t-test, and ANOVA. The findings revealed a significant positive effect of Biology instructional materials on students' academic performance. Students taught with these materials outperformed those without them. However, no significant differences were found based on gender and class size. The study also highlighted the importance of school type, showing a substantial influence of Biology instructional materials on academic performance. Recommendations include the Ministry of Education providing instructional materials, Biology teachers incorporating them in lessons to foster competition, government support for public schools in obtaining instructional materials, and additional infrastructure like classrooms and laboratories..

A Suggestion for Restoring Public Support for Public Schools

Former Secretary of Education David Matthews (1996) and others have noted that public education is in danger of losing public support which is critical to its quality and survival. Suggested causes for declining public enthusiasm range from apathy to financial shifts in the culture. This article proposes that the increasing disavowal of public schools results from experience with day-by-day disinviting behaviors. The suggested remedy is for educators to evaluate their on-the-job responses to their patrons. Wherever subminimal interpersonal conditions are identified, participants should learn how to invite people to education. With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation’s wounds. - Abraham Lincoln

Building a Framework for Educational Practice and Institutional Reform in the EBPM Era: How to Create a Framework for Reform Support for Public Schools

Building a Framework for Educational Practice and Institutional Reform in the EBPM Era: How to Create a Framework for Reform Support for Public Schools

Rhetoric and the purposes of public education: building discourse for shared responsibility

ABSTRACT In this study, we employ discourse analysis of US gubernatorial political advertisements to analyze the discursive struggles over the purposes of public schools. The advertisements are analyzed to demonstrate how rhetoric works to shape consent for dominant, human capital views regarding schooling's purposes, as well as to communicate alternative articulations of schooling's purposes which can disrupt that consent. In the latter exploration, we draw upon the approach of public persuasion, where the public is persuaded to deem something other than dominant economic values as relevant for making education decisions. We analyze alternative contextual cues that can shift citizens’ impressions, leading them to weigh conflicting values toward schools differently. We offer narratives that change the meaning citizens make of schools with the aim of building public support for public schools.

Voting Rights, Deindustrialization, and Republican Ascendancy in the South

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 revolutionized politics in the American South. These changes also had economic consequences, generating gains for white as well as Black southerners. Contrary to the widespread belief that the region turned Republican in direct response to the Civil Rights Revolution, expanded voting rights led to twenty-five years of competitive two-party politics, featuring strong biracial coalitions in the Democratic Party. These coalitions remained competitive in most states until the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. This abrupt rightward shift had many causes, but critical for southern voters were the trade liberalization measures of 1994, specifically NAFTA and the phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement which had protected the textiles and apparel industries for decades. The consequences of Republican state regimes have been severe, including intensified racial polarization, loss of support for public schools and higher education, and harsh policies toward low-income populations.

Social eating patterns, identity and the subjective well-being of Chinese teenagers

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore the association between eating patterns, social identity and the well-being of adolescents via a mixed methods study of Chinese teenagers. The specific research questions presented in this study are as follows: What is the relationship between social eating and well-being? How is the relationship between social eating and well-being mediated by social identity?Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on a sequential mixed methods study, including interviews with 16 teenage–parent dyads, and a large-scale survey of over 1,000 teenagers on their eating patterns, conducted with the support of public schools. A model that tests relationships among social eating, social identity and subjective well-being is developed and tested.FindingsThe results show that dining with family members leads to improved subjective well-being for teenagers, through a partial mediator of stronger family identity. However, dining with peers is not found to influence subjective well-being.Research limitations/implicationsThe privileged position of family meals demonstrated through this study may be an artifact of the location of this study in one Chinese city. Further research is needed related to the connections among social identity, objective well-being and the social patterns of teenagers’ food consumption behavior.Practical implicationsTo improve the subjective well-being of teenagers, families, public policy-makers and food marketers should support food consumption patterns that promote family meals.Originality/valueWhile many food-related consumer studies focus on the individual, social and environmental influences of food choices of adolescents, few studies address how eating patterns affect overall well-being. These results reinforce the importance of understanding the effect of the social context of teenagers’ eating patterns on health and well-being.

Landmark legislation, 1774-2012: major U.S. acts and treaties

The Second Edition of this renowned treasure trove of information about the most important laws and treaties enacted by the U.S. Congress now deepens its historical coverage and examines an entire decade of new legislation. Landmark Legislation 1774-2012 includes additional acts and treaties chosen for their historical significance or their precedential importance for later areas of major federal legislative activity in the over 200 years since the convocation of the Continental Congress. Brand new chapters expand coverage to include the last five numbered Congresses (10 years of activity from 2003-2012), which has seen landmark legislation in the areas of health insurance and health care reform; financial regulatory reform; fiscal stimulus and the Temporary Asset Relief Program; federal support for stem cell research; reform of federal financial support for public schools and higher education; and much more.

Military and Veteran Families and Children: Policies and Programs for Health Maintenance and Positive Development and commentaries

Military and Veteran Families and Children: Policies and Programs for Health Maintenance and Positive Development and commentaries

BUYING THEIR VOTES? A STUDY OF LOCAL TAX‐PRICE DISCRIMINATION

A population's demographic composition may affect political support for various public services. This article examines whether the aging‐in‐place of local residents decreases financial support for public schools in the United States. I expand on previous empirical work by examining whether tax‐price reductions offered to elderly homeowners moderate their effect on local school revenues. The results reveal that an aging population structure substantially decreases school revenues, unless elderly homeowners receive state‐financed reductions in their local tax‐prices. Sizable differences hold even when comparing school districts located near each other but on opposite sides of state borders. Given the imminent aging of the population structure in the United States and many other developed countries, governments' targeted tax reduction policies could have important effects on equilibrium school revenues. (JEL I22, J14, H71)

The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes

Given the increasing costs associated with commercial textbooks and decreasing financial support of public schools, it is important to better understand the impacts of open educational resources on student outcomes. The purpose of this quantitative study is to analyze whether the adoption of open science textbooks significantly affects science learning outcomes for secondary students in earth systems, chemistry, and physics. This study uses a quantitative quasi-experimental design with propensity score matched groups and multiple regression to examine whether student learning was influenced by the adoption of open textbooks instead of traditional publisher-produced textbooks. Students who used open textbooks scored .65 points higher on end-of-year state standardized science tests than students using traditional textbooks when controlling for the effects of 10 student and teacher covariates. Further analysis revealed statistically significant positive gains for students using the open chemistry textbooks, with no significant difference in student scores for earth systems of physics courses. Although the effect size of the gains were relatively small, and not consistent across all textbooks, the finding that open textbooks can be as effective or even slightly more effective than their traditional counterparts has important considerations in terms of school district policy in a climate of finite educational funding.

Try it again, Uncle Sam

The 46th Annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools reveals that Americans say they know a lot more this year about the Common Core State Standards than they indicated a year ago, and they like it a lot less. Americans also say local school boards should have the greatest influence in deciding what is taught in the public schools. Americans support public charter schools, particularly when they’re described as schools that can operate independently and free of regulations. Americans don’t believe standardized tests help teachers know what to teach. Americans continue to assign higher grades to their local schools but far lower grades to the nation’s schools in general. Americans gave the President significantly lower grades on his performance in support of public schools.

Learning from Schools: School Choice, Political Learning, and Policy Feedback

This article investigates the policy feedback and political learning effects of school vouchers. Of particular interest is how market‐based policies affect the likelihood that program participants will connect their experiences with the policy to the government. I examine parent survey data from an evaluation of the Milwaukee school voucher program. I find that voucher parents are more likely than public school parents to perceive that the government has influenced their child's schooling and to believe that their experiences with their child's school have taught them about how government works. Further, voucher parents report that their experiences with the policy have made them more politically active. While majorities of voucher and public school parents support increased public school expenditures, there is some evidence that school vouchers may decrease support for public schools.

Understanding Teacher Education Reform

Teacher education reform in the United States (US) is a crucial part of a broader educational reform intended to improve teaching practice and, thus, student performance (Darling-Hammond, 2005). Teacher education reform has become an international trend (Bates, 2008; Garm & Karlsen, 2004), which in spite of the different national contexts and traditions, shares a set of similar expectations, foci, and even policy interventions (Loomis, Rodriguez, & Tillman, 2008). Underlying these reforms are the assumptions that the quality of teaching is the most important, if not the only, factor that contributes to changes in student learning, which is shaped by factors such as teacher salaries, working conditions, and public support for public schools (Education Policy White Paper Project, 2009). Teacher education is a major factor in improving teaching quality (Delandshere & Petrosky, 2004). Central to the quality of teaching are teachers' deep understanding of what they need to teach and the pedagogical practices that can be used to represent such understanding to students (D. L. Ball, 2000). These have become important foci for reform in teacher education programs in many countries. Policy initiatives to reform teacher education have been very similarly framed, inasmuch as governments have played important roles in establishing standards for what teachers need to know and do in their classrooms and in developing relevant assessments to regulate what students have learned and done (Tatto, 2006). However, when these surface-level similarities are analyzed more deeply, one uncovers competing forces with different expectations, foci, and approaches to teacher education reform (Cochran-Smith, 2001). Each of these approaches reflects different ideologies and appeals to different political interests, but none receives substantial empirical support (Apple, 2001; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001; Zeichner & Ndimande, 2008). Add to this that the contexts and cultural traditions of teaching and teacher education provide little opportunity for important teacher education reform initiatives and ideas to be realized (Feiman-Nemser & Floden, 1986; Little, 1990a, 1990b). Consequently, only an insightful and comprehensive understanding of these competing expectations, foci, and approaches to teacher education reform will have utility in informing future policy making and program development. The research community in teaching and teacher education must accept its notable and irreplaceable role in helping to develop such an understanding through an empirical base focused on the processes and outcomes of reform. In this issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), eight articles address reform and its complexities in the area of teacher education. In this editorial, we first highlight important arguments and findings that emerge from each article. Next, we challenge some of the authors' ideas with support from existing literature and suggest what further conceptual and empirical work is needed to understand dynamic and complex teacher education reform and its contexts. Reform With Competing Expectations for Learning Outcomes and Teaching Underlying various teacher education reforms are two related and seemingly irrefutable assumptions (Delandshere & Petrosky, 2004). First, the quality of teaching is the most important factor that influences student learning. Second, teacher education plays an important role in shaping quality teaching. However, these assumptions sometimes become conceptually ambiguous when used to guide the development of teacher education reform policy and programs. Theoretically speaking, student learning and quality teaching can be defined differently, depending on how one views society and education. Varying definitions imply a range of foci for teacher education reform. Following are three popular conceptions of student learning and teaching quality, as well as their respective foci for teacher education reform, which have made their way into various teacher education reform documents. …

Ray Strong (1905–2006)

Ray Stanford Strong’s Golden Gate Bridge is the embodiment of depression era chutzpa. Powerful and vibrant, this 1930s painting of San Francisco’s nascent technological wonder signals better days ahead. President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected Golden Gate Bridge to hang in the White House as an optimistic example of New Deal art—without a bread line in sight. In the painting’s foreground, two concrete pylons sink deep beneath the earth’s surface. Th e construction workers standing at the back of the right-hand pylon show us the scale of the structure’s enormity. From a bird’s-eye view, looking down into the shadowy excavation pit, our gaze shifts in the middle distance to a red brick fortress. Fort Point, a Spanish structure rebuilt to protect San Francisco during the Civil War, is being subsumed by the iron and steel bridge. In the distance, beyond the city, are the Marin County Headlands, an area of open space that was preserved as a national park in the 1970s. For Strong, the landscape beyond the construction site (not man’s industrial progress) served as a metaphorical beacon, one that would guide his long career as a painter. Indeed, the theme of the bridge also underscores his achievements as a teacher of painting who, over the decades, would link nineteenth-century landscape traditions and the environmental concerns of nature painters in the twenty-fi rst century. Strong died on July 3, 2006, at the age of 101. He was fortunate. Even in his fi nal years, he never lost his gusto for espousing the populist platform he adopted in the 1930s: a living wage for all workers, support for public schools, preservation of public land, and a national public policy that actively champions peace.1 I fi rst met Ray in 1999, when he agreed to speak to my class on American art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Rolling onto the stage in his wheelchair, he told the students how he had painted the mountains of Oregon. “I hiked ’em all,” he explained, “and eventually my knees just wore out.”2 Ray delivered his declaratives on painting and the environment with the passionate gestures of a revival preacher. Paul Karlstrom captured his enthusiasm in a 1993 interview for the Archives of American Art. Strong told Karlstrom, as he did my class, “Look at the land! Get out, live in it! Sleep in it! Paint it!”3 Ray knew that his western landscapes were not part of the artistic “advanced guard” (a term he liked to use jokingly). In the 1960s he was undiminished when abstract painters from the UCSB Art Department revoked his teaching appointment, explaining to the realist painter, “You will undo all our teaching.”4 Strong always knew what he wanted to do. “I had my sights set on trying to paint light, form, color, geology—the works—of Appreciation

Why are Schools Always Begging for Money?

Increasingly high expectations for student performance have led to greater pressures on school resources. While most families support the idea of high-quality schools for all students, funding has not matched this aspiration. Mr. Everhart explores economic shifts, including disproportionately lower tax rates for the extremely wealthy and most corporations, and suggests steps educators must take to adequately fund their schools. I GRADUATED from high school the year after Sputnik soared into space--an event that established forever the expectation that school improvement was tied to national political and economic goals. Soon thereafter, new federal and education money designed to support the race into space seemed plentiful. Today, we have other, equally lofty expectations--specifically, that all children will learn. However, today there is a radical difference from the Sputnik era: the responsibility for achieving the expectations of No Child Left Behind is placed largely on and local governments, which are severely strapped for resources. After high school I attended a private liberal arts college, where tuition costs were relatively reasonable. I earned about a third of my college expenses by working each summer, and my parents were able to afford the balance. Today, expenses at a private liberal arts college range upwards of $30,000 a year. Public universities are no longer supported; rather, they are state assisted. Graduation from a public university with a debt load of $30,000 or more is not unusual for many students. As I reflect on my 38 years in the education profession, it's crystal clear to me that financing public education has become increasingly difficult and contentious. Indeed, one theme seems to characterize the period from my entry into education in the late 1960s to the present: educational institutions have consistently been strapped for resources. Why has public education struggled to attain the resources so commonly denied it? Where does the answer to this question lie? In the school budget ledgers? In the tax revenues upon which school allocations are based? In the political context within which education revenues are allocated? Can we ever expect a turnaround in the level of education funding, or are we doomed to a future of continuing fiscal crisis? Finally, where should educators focus their energies in order to gain the necessary public support for more adequate funding of education? I attempt to address these questions in the remainder of this article. RISING EXPECTATIONS FOR EDUCATION Factors surrounding the financial support of public schools have changed dramatically throughout the nation's history, and these factors are closely tied to the expectations we have for our schools. How have our expectations changed over the past two centuries? According to historian Patricia Graham, the expectations for our school system have evolved through three different periods. (1) The first period was associated with the creation of a system of common schools that the majority of students were expected to attend. This period lasted well into the early 20th century and was highlighted first by the creation of local public elementary schools in the early to mid-19th century and then by the extension of schooling into high schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Public expectations during this era focused on school attendance and continued to rise--that is, students were expected to attend a public school for increasingly longer periods of their lives. We well know, however, that the duration of students' public school careers was not the same for everyone. Students from higher-status families attended for more years than students from lower-status families. In addition, these more privileged students usually attended higher-quality schools. On average, boys attended school for longer periods than girls, and whites had higher attendance rates than children from minority groups. …

Does School Finance Litigation Cause Taxpayer Revolt? Serrano and Proposition 13

An influential theory argues that court-ordered school finance equalization undermines support for public schools. Residents of wealthy school districts who cannot keep their tax revenues for their own school districts may vote to limit school funding altogether. Proponents of this theory point to Serrano v. Priest, a 1977 decision of the California Supreme Court that mandated equalization of school financing and was followed almost immediately by Proposition 13, a ballot initiative to limit the local property tax. I test the theory that these two events were causally related by using hierarchical models to analyze voters within school districts. I find no evidence that opposition to school finance equalization contributed to the tax revolt. Claims about the perverse consequences of school finance litigation should be greeted with skepticism.

The Power of Good Superintendent—School Board Relationships

The quality of superintendent–school board relationships has a direct impact on the success of any school system through the power of good public relations. The traditional roles of superintendents and school boards and the artificial division of labor between the two no longer serve our school systems well. In this article, I apply a model of high-impact board governance from a study of nonprofit organizations to school superintendents and their school boards. The model emphasizes ways of improving public relations and support for public schools.