Few Americans are aware that their nation long ago created a separate government for education, supposedly to shield it from political interference. Some experts believe that at the heart of todays school debates is a push to put the larger government-- presidents, governors, mayors-- in the drivers seat, or even to dump democratic school governance entirely. The results are mixed. One clear result, however, is a vexing tangle of authority and accountability. "Whos in Charge Here?" untangles it all.

From an Iowa homestead, ahead of the Great Depression, to the plains and mountains of Colorado, this book is about a priest using his wits and sensibility to affect the lives of everyone he met. In his journey, he plowed forward, but had to turn corners quickly into fields he hadnt imagined. The supposed director of his life found himself being directed. Why are 300 Christmas cards his reminder that this was all good when so many people from every walk of life think of him as friend and family.

From Dr. Bob Barnes comes this book showing how to discipline children with consistency and love without feeling guilty or causing anger and resentment.

As we watch wave after wave of volatility threaten the global economy, it is tempting to ask, who is in charge here? The answer, journalist and economist Alan Beattie explains, is all too often no one. The crisis that began with mortgages in American suburbia has now spread around the world from banks to businesses to governments, threatening to bring decades of economic progress to a juddering halt. Globalization's strengths - its speed, breadth, and complexity - have also proved to be weaknesses as the crisis has traveled more rapidly and widely around the globe than the boom, and faster than governments have usually been able to react. The United States, which has led the global economy since the second world war, has been weakened by political division at home. Like ancient Rome, it has been challenged by an array of upstarts - emerging markets like China, India and Brazil. But just like the tribes that brought down the Roman Empire, the rising powers are strong enough to block American leadership yet not united enough to provide direction of their own. In Europe, as country after country has slid towards trouble, it has become evident that the eurozone's slow and unwieldy policy frameworks are woefully unfit for dealing with financial crises. As Beattie writes: "It [is] like watching a gang of irascible, quarrelsome architects trying to redesign a house in the middle of a raging fire." With the penetrating wit for which he is known, Alan Beattie explains how international economic institutions like the IMF can work - and how they often don't. He calls out the more spectacular failures of judgment and leadership, as well as the less frequent bright spots, in handling the crisis, showing how governments scrambled to respond as the ground started to give way.

The issues of our presidential elections and the virtues and flaws of our candidates come into sharp focus when illuminated by the wit of political observers. America's humorists brighten the electoral scene, reminding us that we needn't always look at presidential campaigns with a solemn air. Thanks to the satiric insights of America's wits, we are able to keep a sense of perspective about the candidates, particularly when their follies and foibles are most intolerable. It is the presidential campaign humor created by America's comedians, humorists, journalists, editorial cartoonists, and the candidates themselves that writer Gerald Gardner celebrates in Campaign Comedy. He reviews the humor, from the caustic to the comedic, that most recently targeted Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot in the explosive 1992 election. He also focuses, in a campaign-by-campaign format, on the humor generated by the presidential campaigns ranging back to the epochal struggle between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. Candidates including Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson, and the men they defeated are also the subject of the hilarious or vicious wit that is chronicled here. Campaign Comedy is brimming with relevant and pithy humor from Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Art Buchwald, Mark Russell, Bob Hope, Mort Sahl, Garry Trudeau, and the closet wits who supplied the presidential candidates with the "spontaneous humor" that they employed during their campaigns. Gardner also highlights the campaign humor of television's most famous political shows, "That Was the Week That Was," "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," and "Saturday Night Live." Gerald Gardner provides a delightful reminder that humor is a basic form of communication through which the media, the humorists, and the candidates convey their skepticism, anger, and differences. He makes it clear why humor is the most essential element in a democracy and why it is the one ingredient that no totalitarian society seems to possess.

In 1991, the Government of Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, requiring governments at all levels to ensure that Canadian laws and practices safeguard the rights of children. A Question of Commitment: Children’s Rights in Canada is the first book to assess the extent to which Canada has fulfilled this commitment. The editors, R. Brian Howe and Katherine Covell, contend that Canada has wavered in its commitment to the rights of children and is ambivalent in the political culture about the principle of children’s rights. A Question of Commitment expands the scope of the editors’ earlier book, The Challenge of Children’s Rights for Canada, by including the voices of specialists in particular fields of children’s rights and by incorporating recent developments.