Contenu du sommaire : L'éducation, enjeu d'avenir pour l'Amérique

Since at least the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, a nearly continuous string of American presidents have put their political prestige and their political capital behind a series of educational reform efforts that routinely have failed to achieve the lofty goals set out for them. Unfortunately, there are no simple or easy solutions for the complex and daunting challenges facing U.S. education. The exaggerated promises of Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind were unrealistic and unattainable in 10-12 years. In light of the recent severe budgetary constraints in the United States, most of the education funding probably will continue to be provided by states and local communities, both of which are now facing reduced revenues and other rising costs. Nevertheless, reformers can facilitate the gradual improvement of U.S. education by investing more wisely in long-term, rigorous research as well as developing more challenging, uniform education standards. Given that President Barack Obama has been in office for just over a year, whether he will make major changes in federal education policy remains to be seen.

Higher Education and Obama's Stimulus Gambit
The Obama administration's stimulus package helped mitigate large state budget cuts to public services in 2009-2010. But it was not enough. States have very limited ability to borrow funds for operating costs, making the federal government the last resort. In short, how state budgets go, so goes U.S. higher education; whereas most national systems of higher education financing is tied to national budgets with an ability to borrow. The money from the stimulus package will be largely spent by the 2011 fiscal year, unless Congress and the White House renew funding support on a similar scale for states that are coping with projected large budget gaps. That now seems unlikely. Without substantially more federal aid to state governments, many public colleges and universities will face another major round of budget cuts.

Teacher turnover, or the act of a teacher leaving a school, can lead to instructional instability at the school and makes implementing policies difficult. The magnitude of teacher turnover in the United States is not high, but nationwide averages mask the fact that schools serving low-achieving, poor and non-white students often experience high turnover rate. In this paper, the authors first draw upon nationally representative datasets to describe differences in demographic characteristics, educational backgrounds and school attributes between teachers who stay in the same school, those who transfer across schools, and those who leave teaching altogether. Next, the authors focus on the role of school leadership in influencing teacher turnover, since, in most school districts in the United States, principals play the central role in hiring of teachers and in evaluation and retention. Here the authors draw upon recently-collected primary data from Milwaukee Public Schools to identify strategies principals use to influence teacher turnover.

Starving The Doha Round: Subsidized Agriculture in Europe and The United States
When the Doha Round of international trade talks was suspended in July 2008, blame was focused on China and India. Although there were many sources of failure, the most important do not reside in the developing world, but rather are embedded and institutionalized agricultural subsidies of the European Union and the United States. It should be possible to reduce these subsidies and enable completion of the Round because they are economically unsustainable in Europe and ideologically and economically problematic in the United States. So far, the history of trade liberalization has reflected the initiatives of Democratic American presidents; but free trade.

What Happened to the Anti-Globalization Movement in the U.S.?
More than ten years after the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, the political legacy of the “global justice network” – as alter-globalist movements like to be called – in the United States is mixed. On the one hand, the mobilization of outsiders or non-institutionalized groups has partly declined, owing to both internal and external factors. On the other hand, the sustained advocacy efforts of interest groups or insiders, though unable to thwart the investment and trade-liberalizing policies, have allowed the movement to raise the prominence of the alter-globalist cause in the United States. This claim also applies to the Obama administration, who, despite its sympathy for the social and environmental demands of the blue-green coalition, has not significantly changed the course of American foreign economic policy.