Helen Plum Library

Set against the backdrop of a monopoly public school system that consigns millions of disadvantaged children to educational inequality, the Cleveland school vouchers case, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court - which on June 27, 2002 upheld the program in an historic decision - has brought the issue of educational freedom to national attention. Some have called it the most important lawsuit of its kind since Brown v. Board of Education. In this...

Solutions … not theories. Political progress … not political posturing. Instead of the constant jockeying for political advantage, in What Works, author and columnist Cal Thomas focuses on what promotes the general welfare, regardless of which party or ideology gets the credit. Thomas probes and provides answers to questions like, Why must we constantly fight the same battles over and over? Why don't we consult the past and use common sense in...

The hard part of government is not passing new laws but implementing those laws. Implementation is where high-minded ideas are pushed and prodded into the chaos that is the real world. Often, this leads to unintended consequences as ideas are transformed into actions. For better or worse, policy implementation occurs within organized anarchies marred by ambiguity where who pays attention to what and when is the most important determinant of outcomes....

The novel theoretical framework offered in this book presents a radical reconception of the place of knowledge in contemporary policy making in Europe.

In my 10 plus years of teaching, I have found that students struggle with two major challenges in writing a quality capstone paper. First, they have difficulty creating a rigorous analytical framework. Too often, the papers tend to be more descriptive in nature, which means that the final policy recommendation may be flawed. This book attempts to fill that gap by discussing in detail the various components of the framework as well as their interdependence....

Austerity has left local government struggling to meet the demands for local services. In this context, this book asks 'what are the fundamental principles that should guide decision-making by local councillors and officers?' It seeks to move the agenda from 'what works?' to 'what should local government do?' and 'how will its policies impact on social justice and local democracy?' Reclaiming local democracy examines the politics of human need and...

Which Side of History? offers a collection of bold essays on how technology is affecting democracy, society, and our future. Featuring prominent national voices such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Marc Benioff, Ellen Pao, Ken Auletta, Chelsea Clinton, Tim Wu, Khaled Hosseini, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Jaron Lanier, Willow Bay, Sal Khan, Sherry Turkle, Shoshana Zuboff, Vivek Murthy, Geoffrey Canada, and many more. The essays focus on the extraordinary...

This book presents an academically rigorous yet practical guide to efforts to understand how knowledge, policy and power interact to promote or prevent change.

Owen Fiss is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University. His books include The Irony of Free Speech, Liberalism Divided, and The Civil Rights Injunction. Joshua Cohen is Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at MIT. He is Editor of Boston Review. Jefferson Decker, a former managing editor of Boston Review, is a graduate student in U.S. History at Columbia University. Joel Rogers is the John...

It is often assumed that because the contemporary welfare state is generous, its critics must therefore lack generosity, as well as compassion. Tibor R. Machan, a distinguished moral philosopher, demonstrates why that is a mistaken notion. He places generosity among the human virtues and shows why virtue requires moral choice rather than coercion. He argues that generosity can only be cultivated in freedom because there is no virtue in a compulsory...