Author: Paul Charles Light
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300076578
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
During the past fifty years, the Congresses and presidents of the United States have made many efforts to improve the performance of the federal government. In this book, a leading expert in public management examines the most important reform statutes passed and concludes that the problem is not too little reform but too much. Paul Light explains that Congress and the presidency have never decided whether they trust government and its employees to do their jobs well, and so they have moved back and forth over the decades between four reform philosophies: scientific management, war on waste, watchful eye, and liberation management. These four philosophies, argues Light, operate with different goals, implementation strategies, and impacts. Yet reform initiatives draw on one or another of them almost at random, often canceling out the potential benefits of a particular statute by passing a contradictory statute soon afterward. Light shows that as the public has become increasingly distrustful of government, the reform agenda has favored the war on waste and watchful eye. He analyzes the consequences of these changes for the overall performance of government and offers policy recommendations for future reform approaches.
Author: Robert Zemsky
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813548462
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher educationùwho's angry, who's disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn't understand. Robert Zemsky, one of a select group of scholars who participated in Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, signed off on the commission's report with reluctance. In Making Reform Work he presents the ideas he believes should have come from that group to forge a practical agenda for change. Zemsky argues that improving higher education will require enlisting faculty leadership, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy for changing the higher education system writ large. Directing his attention from what can't be done to what can be done, Zemsky provides numerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students' performance in high schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teaching methods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging eventsùfor example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowmentsùthat could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive. Making Reform Work offers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don't vilify, don't play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.
Author: Grace Sammon
Publisher: Corwin Press
ISBN: 1452206295
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
Looking for effective strategies and best practices to break the cycle of ineffective school reform implementation? The author takes a sobering look at the state of high school reform and identifies the elements that keep us "running in place", rather than making progress on a road to success. This research-based resource-with built-in book study and facilitator’s guide-arms readers with the skills to establish and sustain the critical elements for schools' success: Demonstrating high expectations and a vision that matches it Building capacity for ultimate success Thinking small, dreaming big Engaging in legitimate community support Strong, sustained, and shared leadership
Author: Harry J. Holzer
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815730225
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
Practical solutions for improving higher education opportunities for disadvantaged students Too many disadvantaged college students in America do not complete their coursework or receive any college credential, while others earn degrees or certificates with little labor market value. Large numbers of these students also struggle to pay for college, and some incur debts that they have difficulty repaying. The authors provide a new review of the causes of these problems and offer promising policy solutions. The circumstances affecting disadvantaged students stem both from issues on the individual side, such as weak academic preparation and financial pressures, and from institutional failures. Low-income students disproportionately attend schools that are underfunded and have weak performance incentives, contributing to unsatisfactory outcomes for many students. Some solutions, including better financial aid or academic supports, target individual students. Other solutions, such as stronger linkages between coursework and the labor market and more structured paths through the curriculum, are aimed at institutional reforms. All students, and particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, also need better and varied pathways both to college and directly to the job market, beginning in high school. We can improve college outcomes, but must also acknowledge that we must make hard choices and face difficult tradeoffs in the process. While no single policy is guaranteed to greatly improve college and career outcomes, implementing a number of evidence-based policies and programs together has the potential to improve these outcomes substantially.
Author: Shadd Maruna
Publisher: Amer Psychological Assn
ISBN: 9781557987310
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
Based on the Liverpool Desistance Study, this book compares and contrasts the stories of ex-convicts who are actively involved in criminal behavior with those who are desisting from crime and drug use. Extensive excerpts from the study reveal two types of personal narratives: a "condemnation" script favored by active offenders and a "generative" script favored by desisters. The way that these scripts are constructed and the manner in which they are used is then examined in light of contemporary criminological and psychological thought. The results suggests that success in reform depends on providing rehabilitative opportunities that reinforce the generative script. This study reveals a constructive new direction for offender rehabilitation efforts and will appeal to a wide range of readers from psychologists and criminologists to legislators, administrators, substance abuse counselors, and offenders themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)
Author: Matt Andrews
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139619640
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Developing countries commonly adopt reforms to improve their governments yet they usually fail to produce more functional and effective governments. Andrews argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.
Author: Paul Charles Light
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
Designed as a supplemental text for courses in public policy, this text provides a case-study of the public policy decision-making process within the American political framework. It outlines the issues, actions and results of decisions which have contributed to the making and re-making of social security reform, demonstrating throughout the complexity of the process of social change.
Author: Jens Soering
Publisher: Lantern Books
ISBN: 9781590560761
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
The author, himself a former inmate in the American Corrections System, writes about the state of the American prisons and the justice system and the American public's misconceptions about the system.
Author: John Merrow
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972433
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The prize-winning PBS correspondent's provocative antidote to America's misguided approaches to K-12 school reform During an illustrious four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow—winner of the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the McGraw Prize—reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on everything from the rise of district-wide cheating scandals and the corporate greed driving an ADD epidemic to teacher-training controversies and America's obsession with standardized testing. Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary. Now, the revered education correspondent of PBS NewsHour distills his best thinking on education into a twelve-step approach to fixing a K–12 system that Merrow describes as being "addicted to reform" but unwilling to address the real issue: American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters—including "Measure What Matters," and "Embrace Teachers"—that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing. Addicted to Reform is written with the kind of passionate concern that could come only from a lifetime devoted to the people and places that constitute the foundation of our nation. It is a "big book" that forms an astute and urgent blueprint for providing a quality education to every American child.
Author: Joe Mathews
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520268520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
"California Crackup is brilliant. It cuts through the familiar tangle of diagnoses and quick-fix solutions to provide a comprehensive and persuasive analysis of California's dysfunctional governmental system. Paul and Mathews have coolly laid out a complicated story, made it readable, sometimes even comedic. It is the best discussion of the issue I've seen in over three decades."--Peter Schrag, author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment "I know of no other work that combines so succinctly and enjoyably a historical summary of California's existing problems with such a sweeping and provocative program of reform."--Ethan Rarick, University of California, Berkeley "Mark Paul and Joe Mathews have produced an indispensable guide to California's crisis of governance--and they have done so with humor, scholarship, fairness and storytelling verve. Every Californian should read this book."--Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars "Mark Paul... has a talent for presenting California Big Think stuff in an easily accessible and always readable way...[offering] clear and creative insights on the subject of California's collapse."--CalBuzz "Joe Mathews has done an artful, fascinating, and convincing job of connecting the California of today's Schwarzenegger era to the long history that made his rise possible.--James Fallows,The Atlantic Monthly on Mathews' book, The People's Machine
