Observing the storm of recent debates around school vouchers, James G. Dwyer concludes that the welfare of children has been routinely subordinated to the interests and supposed rights of various groups of adults—parents, teachers, taxpayers, and advocates for ideological causes. Dwyer argues that a truly child-centered approach to education reform would yield dramatically different conclusions regarding the morality and constitutionality of government initiatives to improve public and private schooling in America.Dwyer makes the case that state funding of religious and other private schools is not only permissible, but mandatory, as a moral and constitutional right of the children already in private schools. In Vouchers within Reason, he also demonstrates the necessity of attaching to that funding robust standards for the content and nature of instruction and for treatment of students. These are just the sort of regulatory strings that most current supporters of vouchers fear.In the author's view, vouchers represent an opportunity for states to accomplish what they have been unable to do in the past—namely, to bring academic accountability to religious schools, many of which fail to provide a good secular education. He sees voucher programs that are now in place as morally irresponsible and clearly unconstitutional, however, because they require almost nothing of recipient schools in return for the funding. This book reorients the hot topic of universal school vouchers in a new and vital direction that may change the minds of scholars, educators, and policymakers alike.

Warren Nord's thoughtful book tackles an issue of great importance in contemporary America: the role of religion in our public schools and universities. According to Nord, public opinion has been excessively polarized by those religious conservatives who would restore religious purposes and practices to public education and by those secular liberals for whom religion is irrelevant to everything in the curriculum. While he maintains that public schools and universities must not promote religion, he also argues that there are powerful philosophical, political, moral, and constitutional reasons for requiring students to study religion. Indeed, only if religion is included in the curriculum will students receive a truly liberal education, one that takes seriously a variety of ways of understanding the human experience. Intended for a broad audience, Nord's comprehensive study encompasses American history, constitutional law, educational theory and practice, theology, philosophy, and ethics. It also discusses a number of current, controversial issues, including multiculturalism, moral education, creationism, academic freedom, and the voucher and school choice movements.

This book takes a new look at one of the most contentious periods in American history. The battles over schools that surrounded the famous Scopes "monkey" trial in 1925 were about much more than evolution. Fundamentalists fought to maintain cultural control of education. As this book reveals for the first time, the successes and the failures of these fundamentalist campaigns transformed both the fundamentalist movement and the nature of education in America. In turn, those transformations determined many of the positions of the "culture wars" that raged throughout the twentieth century.

Exploring a subject that is as important as it is divisive, this two-volume work offers the first current, definitive work on the intricacies and issues relative to America's faith-based schools. The Praeger Handbook of Faith-Based Schools in the United States, K–12 is an indispensable study at a time when American education is increasingly considered through the lenses of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class. With contributions from an impressive array of experts, the two-volume work provides a historical overview of faith-based schooling in the United States, as well as a comprehensive treatment of each current faith-based school tradition in the nation. The first volume examines three types of faith-based schools—Protestant schools, Jewish schools, and Evangelical Protestant homeschooling. The second volume focuses on Catholic, Muslim, and Orthodox schools, and addresses critical issues common to faith-based schools, among them state and federal regulation and school choice, as well as ethnic, cultural, confessional, and practical factors. Perhaps most importantly for those concerned with the questions and controversies that abound in U.S. education, the handbook grapples with outcomes of faith-based schooling and with the choices parents face as they consider educational options for their children.

Published in 1986, this selected bibliography considers private schools that are religiously affiliated. Divided into several sections the book open with chapters covering the most influential general books on religion and schooling and offers summaries and analysis of court decisions and commentaries on the issues of government aid and regulation. The book goes on to provide entries of the schools operating in the United States by seventeen religious groups, entries are annotated by experts from the field. The final section of the book considers statements on religious schools made by both public school educators and religious school advocates; formal and informal interactions between the public and religious schools; and the concept of the education of the public by religious and public schools. This work pulls together a wealth of reference material, mainly on religious schools, and provides a much-needed resource for those interested in religious schooling, whether researcher, scholar, student or policy-maker.

Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly find their way into English language arts curriculum, learning, teaching, and teacher education work. Yet many public school literacy teachers and secondary teacher educators feel unsure how to engage religious and spiritual topics and responses in their classrooms. This volume responds to this challenge with an in-depth exploration of diverse experiences and perspectives on Christianity within American education. Authors not only examine how Christianity – the historically dominant religion in American society – shapes languaging and literacies in schooling and other educational spaces, but they also imagine how these relations might be reconfigured. From curricula to classroom practice, from narratives of teacher education to youth coming-to-faith, chapters vivify how spiritual lives, beliefs, practices, communities, and religious traditions interact with linguistic and literate practices and pedagogies. In relating legacies of Christian languaging and literacies to urgent issues including White supremacy, sexism and homophobia, and the politics of exclusion, the volume enacts and invites inclusive relational configurations within and across the myriad American Christian sub-cultures coming to bear on English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning. This courageous collection contributes to an emerging scholarly literature at the intersection of language and literacy teaching and learning, religious literacy, curriculum studies, teacher education, and youth studies. It will speak to teacher educators, scholars, secondary school teachers, and graduate and postgraduate students, among others.

In this insightful book, two leading scholars in Christian education trace the history of the discipline from the Old Testament to the present. Presented against the backdrop of wider philosophical thought and historical events, Anthony and Benson show how each successive era shaped the practice of Christian education today. The result is a book brimming with insights that reveal the historical roots and philosophical underpinnings of issues relevant to current practice in Christian education ministries."The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with more than just valuable insights regarding the past. . . . The future is the emphasis of this history book." From the Introduction

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment governs the relationship between the institutions of the church and those of the state; the Supreme Court, as arbiter of the Constitution, has, since 1947, sought to determine where the line between the two should be drawn. This book shows how and why the Court drew the line in particular cases and how and why the lines that were drawn by the Court had an impact on the relationship between institutions of government and the Church, shaping US politics and society. Using the Supreme Court's cases as a framework, the book shows how the constitutional underpinnings of church-state debates shaped the political, economic, and social debate on the issue, and explores broader debates about religion and American society. This book maintains that the Court cases cannot be understood separately from the context from which they arose and that legal factors are only part of a broader picture for a historical understanding of the Court and Establishment Clause cases.

Educational Research: A Guide to the Process is a different kind of research text. It emphasizes the process of research, that is, what researchers actually do as they go about designing and carrying out their research activities. Rather than passively reading about research operations, it promotes content mastery by using a three-step pedagogical model that involves: a manageable chunk of text, a comprehension or application exercise, and author feedback on the exercise. The text contains approximately 150 of these exercise-feedback units. The second edition has been thoroughly updated, expanded from 15 to 20 chapters, and reorganized into two parts. Part I covers basic aspects of the research process, provides an example of a student research proposal, and shows how to evaluate a research report. Part II provides a separate chapter for each research methodology, including two chapters on qualitative research. Other noteworthy changes include more annotated studies and more visual illustrations of statistical and research methods.