David Paris

Hamilton College

The movement for education reform is currently moving on two distinct tracks. One emphasizes national policies, especially subject-area standards. The other focuses on local control and experimentation through restructuring and charters. This article examines some of the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy and their consistency with one anoth...

Much of the rhetoric concerning educational reform has focused on the role of education in improving economic competitiveness and productivity. This article notes some of the difficulties in assuming strong links between education and the economy, especially given our limited understanding of the relationship of education and job skills. These diff...

I examine the search for a @'tie that binds,@' or @'core@' values, in liberal political theory, specifically Rawls's recent arguments, and in proposals concerning moral education in the public schools. Both Rawls and the proponents of moral education appeal to consensus or shared values, but the search for core values in both theory and practice is...

During the last decade a good deal of discussion of the “communitarian critique” of liberalism has occurred. The debate is perplexing for a number of reasons. The competing positions are often difficult to characterize (or, sometimes, even to distinguish) and it is often unclear what would be the thèoretical or practical significance of affirming o...

THIS PAPER describesDISCUSS, a combination of two computer programs currently under development at Hamilton College.DISCUSS is designed to help improve students’ reading skills and their preparation for class discussion. One part of the system, namedAuthor, provides instructors with both graphical and textual interfaces for designing and developing...

Prominent contemporary defenses of liberalism offered by John Rawls (1971, 1985), Ronald Dworkin (1977, 1978, 1983), and Bruce Ackerman (1981) make (explicit or implicit) appeals to the idea of neutrality. This essay critically examines these appeals by distinguishing "internal" from "external" neutrality, and the neutrality of principles from neut...

During the past several years policy analysis has emerged from the social sciences as a major focus of research activity. That heritage has positive consequences, as in the powerful methodology it has Word to the study of discrete policy problems, but there are negative consequences as well. One specific problem is the support it gives to an episte...

Representational Role Theory is applied to presidential nominating conventions. Delegates to the 1976 Democratic convention are compared to the voters who selected their slates in 10 key presidential preference primaries. Because of party rule restrictions on delegates'' behavior, representational roles are not pertinent to what is typically the mo...

In Thinking About Crime James Q. Wilson brings a new dimension to crime policy research by explicating the failure of criminologists to adequately consider the philosophical perspectives on man and society which underlie alternate policy options. As a result, they rarely appreciate the inherent limits on government efforts to deal with crime. Wilso...