The Day After Reform

The Day After Reform PDF Author: Michael J. Malbin
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780914341567
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Utilizing surveys, reports, and interviews, looks at the states to see how campaign finance reforms have worked out in fact, after organizations have had a chance to adapt to them.

The Day After Reform

The Day After Reform PDF Author: Michael J. Malbin
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780914341567
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Utilizing surveys, reports, and interviews, looks at the states to see how campaign finance reforms have worked out in fact, after organizations have had a chance to adapt to them.

Locked In

Locked In PDF Author: John Pfaff
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096921
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Pfaff, let there be no doubt, is a reformer...Nonetheless, he believes that the standard story--popularized in particular by Michelle Alexander, in her influential book, The New Jim Crow--is false. We are desperately in need of reform, he insists, but we must reform the right things, and address the true problem."--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker A groundbreaking examination of our system of imprisonment, revealing the true causes of mass incarceration as well as the best path to reform In the 1970s, the United States had an incarceration rate comparable to those of other liberal democracies-and that rate had held steady for over 100 years. Yet today, though the US is home to only about 5 percent of the world's population, we hold nearly one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration is now widely considered one of the biggest social and political crises of our age. How did we get to this point? Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent fifteen years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations-the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons-tell us much less than we think. Pfaff urges us to look at other factors instead, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before. He describes a fractured criminal justice system, in which counties don't pay for the people they send to state prisons, and in which white suburbs set law and order agendas for more-heavily minority cities. And he shows that if we hope to significantly reduce prison populations, we have no choice but to think differently about how to deal with people convicted of violent crimes-and why some people are violent in the first place. An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe, Locked In transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.

Making Reform Work

Making Reform Work PDF Author: Robert Zemsky
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813548463
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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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.

Reform in the Making

Reform in the Making PDF Author: Ann Chih Lin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400823676
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Is it time to give up on rehabilitating criminals? Record numbers of Americans are going to prison, and most of them will eventually return to society with a high chance of becoming repeat offenders. But a decision to abandon rehabilitation programs now would be premature warns Ann Chih Lin, who finds that little attention has been given to how these programs are actually implemented and why they tend to fail. In Reform in the Making, she not only supplies much-needed information on the process of program implementation but she also considers its social context, the daily realities faced by prison staff and inmates. By offering an in-depth look at common rehabilitation programs currently in operation--education, job training, and drug treatment--and examining how they are used or misused, Lin offers a practical approach to understanding their high failure rate and how the situation could be improved. Based on extensive observation and over 350 interviews with staff and prisoners in five medium-security male prisons, the book contrasts successfully implemented programs with subverted, abandoned, or neglected programs (those which staff reject or which do not teach prisoners anything useful). Lin explains that staff and prisoners have little patience with programs aimed at long-range goals when they must face the ongoing, immediate challenge of surviving prison life. Finding incentives to make both sides participate fully in rehabilitation is among the book's many contributions to improving prison policy.

The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development

The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development PDF 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.

Remedy and Reaction

Remedy and Reaction PDF Author: Paul Starr
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300206666
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
In no other country has health care served as such a volatile flashpoint of ideological conflict. America has endured a century of rancorous debate on health insurance, and despite the passage of legislation in 2010, the battle is not yet over. This book is a history of how and why the United States became so stubbornly different in health care, presented by an expert with unsurpassed knowledge of the issues. Tracing health-care reform from its beginnings to its current uncertain prospects, Paul Starr argues that the United States ensnared itself in a trap through policies that satisfied enough of the public and so enriched the health-care industry as to make the system difficult to change. He reveals the inside story of the rise and fall of the Clinton health plan in the early 1990sùand of the Gingrich counterrevolution that followed. And he explains the curious tale of how Mitt RomneyÆs reforms in Massachusetts became a model for Democrats and then follows both the passage of those reforms under Obama and the explosive reaction they elicited from conservatives. Writing concisely and with an even hand, the author offers exactly what is needed as the debate continuesùa penetrating account of how health care became such treacherous terrain in American politics.

Addicted to Reform

Addicted to Reform PDF Author: John Merrow
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972433
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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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.

The Dark Side of Reform

The Dark Side of Reform PDF Author: Tyrell Connor
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793643768
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The Dark Side of Reform: Exploring the Impact of Public Policy on Racial Equity contains nine chapters on the development of social policies with the potential to advance racial equity. In addition to studying these policies and their implications, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how lessons from the past can be used to inform the direction of current discussions. At the heart of these conversations are concerns about whether Black people, in particular, will receive the full benefit of transformative laws that may emerge in the coming years. The volume also offers recommendations on implementing policies that address the unique concerns of structurally disadvantaged communities with particular emphasis on Black and Latinx people.

Left Back

Left Back PDF Author: Diane Ravitch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743203267
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
In this authoritative history of American education reforms in this century, a distinguished scholar makes a compelling case that our schools fail when they consistently ignore their central purpose--teaching knowledge.

A Challenging Reform

A Challenging Reform PDF Author: Piero Marini
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 9780814630358
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In these pages Archbishop Piero Marini reveals the Vision, courage, and faith of the pastors and scholars who struggled to implement the Second Vatican Council's teachings on the liturgy. While in some circles it is fashionable to propose a reform of the liturgical reform, any such revision needs to take into account the history of the consilium 'the organism established by the Holy See to carry out the initial liturgical changes. This story of the work of the consilium offers a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and tensions that accompanied the realization of the council's dream to promote the full, conscious and active participation" of the faithful in Roman Catholic worship. Piero Marini was ordained on June 27, 1965. He became the personal secretary for Archbishop Annibale Bugnini in 1975 and in 1987 was appointed the head of the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, a position he currently holds. In 1998, Marini was appointed Titular Bishop of Martirano, Italy, and was ordained bishop the following month. In 2003, Marini was appointed Titular Archbishop of Martirano. He also served as the Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations from 1987-2007. "