Kenneth R. Howe

• University of Colorado Boulder

Sixteen states have adopted school report card accountability systems that assign A-F letter grades to schools. Other states are now engaged in deliberation about whether they, too, should adopt such systems. This paper examines A-F accountability systems with respect to three kinds of validity. First, it examines whether or not these accountabilit...

Background: Local control has historically been a prominent principle in education policymaking and governance. Culminating with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), however, the politics of education have been nationalized to an unprecedented degree, and local control has all but disappeared as a principle framing education policymaking. Du...

The year 2013 marked the 30th anniversary of the report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Its original release was the watershed for a series of federal policies that would increasingly undercut the local control of public schools. The crux of its argument was that public school achievement was declining, threatening the nat...

The dominant conception of educational equality in the United States is meritocratic: an individual's chances of educational achievements should track only (natural) talent and effort, not social class or other morally irrelevant factors. The meritocratic conception must presuppose that natural talent and effort can be isolated from social class —...

This article largely agrees with John White's characterizations of the relationships among philosophy of education, philosophy more generally, and the conventional world. It then extends what White identifies as the fundamental problem that should now be occupying philosophy of education - the irreconcilable opposition between education for Smithia...

When I landed in a faculty position in philosophy of education I took it upon myself to learn a good deal of social science, something I hadn't felt the need to do when I spent all of my time in a philosophy department. © 2014 SensePublishers-Rotterdam, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.

Executive Summary Local control has historically been a prominent principle in education policymaking and governance. Culminating with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), however, the politics of education have been nationalized to an unprecedented degree, and local control has all but disappeared as a principle framing education policymak...

This article distinguishes a disjunctive conception of mixed methods/triangulation, which brings different methods to bear on different questions, from a conjunctive conception, which brings different methods to bear on the same question. It then examines a more inclusive, holistic conception of mixed methods/triangulation that accommodates ostensi...

This article investigates the relationship between research methods and conceptions of causation in mixed-methods research. It begins by distinguishing the natural conception of causation from the intentional conception. Natural causation construes causal explanation as establishing and accounting for ordered patterns of human behavior on the model...

Der Positivismus ist zu früh totgesagt worden. Obwohl man explizit artikulierte Versionen schon vor einiger Zeit in der Philosophie verworfen hat, floriert der Positivismus in unterschwelliger Form in vielen Bereichen weiter (z. B. Code 1993; Harding 2006; Lessl 2005). Einer dieser Bereiche ist die „neue wissenschaftliche Orthodoxie“ (Howe 2008) in...

The values of aggregative democracy have dominated much of civic education as its values reflect the realities of the American political system. We argue that deliberative democratic theory better addresses the moral and epistemological demands of democracy when compared to aggregative democracy. It better attends to protecting citizens’ autonomy t...

In November 2008, Colorado voters considered a ballot initiative intended to end affirmative action in public education, employment, and contracting in the state. Known by proponents as the “Colorado Civil Rights Initiative,” Amendment 46 would have prohibited “discrimination or preferential treatment in public employment, public education, and pub...

I very much welcome this opportunity to respond to the provocative commentaries by Eric Bredo, R. Burke Johnson, and Linda Tillman on my article "Positivist Dogmas, Rhetoric, and the Education Science Question" (this issue of Educational Researcher, pp. 428-440). Though by no means exhaustive of the views to be found among the readers of Educationa...

Explicit versions of positivism were cast off some time ago in philosophy, but a tacit form continues to thrive in education research, exemplified by the “new scientific orthodoxy” codified in the National Research Council's Scientific Research in Education (2002) and reinforced in the American Educational Research Association's Standards for Repor...

The demand for scientifically-based educational research has fostered a new methodological orthodoxy exemplified by documents such as the National Research Council's Scientific Research in Education and Advancing Scientific Research in Education and American Educational Research Association's Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Rese...

This article briefly characterizes a deliberative democratic approach to program evaluation, recounts its application to the evaluation of school choice policy in the Boulder Valley School District, and describes the results and recommendations of the evaluation. It then assesses the evaluation in terms of its role in stimulating policy change and...

This article briefly characterizes a deliberative democratic approach to program evaluation, recounts its application to the evaluation of school choice policy in the Boulder Valley School District, and describes the results and recommendations of the evaluation. It then assesses the evaluation in terms of its role in stimulating policy change and...

The ascendant view in the current debate about education science —experimentism— is a reassertion of the randomized experiment as the methodological gold standard. Advocates of this view have ignored, not answered, long-standing criticisms of the randomized experiment: its frequent impracticality, its lack of external validity, its confinement to a...

Among the two most prominent school reform measures currently being implemented in The United States are school choice and test-based accountability. Until recently, the two policy initiatives remained relatively distinct from one another. With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), a mutualism between choice and accountability...

Judging evaluations on the basis of their potential for democratic deliberation includes consideration of three interrelated criteria: inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation.

The concept of scientifically based research occupies a central place in the thinking of the newly formed Institute of Education Sciences and seems well on its way to becoming the dominant paradigm in educational research more generally. What interpretation becomes recognized as the correct one thus has important implications. This article identifi...

What should the civic purposes of education be in a liberal and diverse society? Is there a tension between cultivating citizenship and respecting social diversity? What are the boundaries of parental and state authority over education? Linking political theory with educational history and policy, Rob Reich offers provocative new answers to these q...

Major principles underlying school choice—such as market competition and parental autonomy—are in serious tension with the principles underlying inclusion from both philosophical and legal perspectives. In this article, the authors explicate this tension and then examine the empirical evidence indicating that exclusion of students with special need...

Many evaluators already implement the principles we explicate here without any urging from us. They have developed their own approaches, their own intuitions, and their own robust senses of justice. Nonetheless, such principles are too important to leave to chance or intuition all the time. It may help to have a justification and checklist to remin...

The issues I treat in this book—qualitative versus quantitative methods, facts versus values, science versus politics, subjectivity versus objectivity, postm- ernism versus pragmatism, to name a few—are at the core of a lively, sometimes divisive, conversation that has been unfolding in the theory and practice of e- cational research for some time....

Given the effort and expense it would take to get school choice right - free transportation and concerted efforts to disseminate accessible information are minimum requirements - we would do well to abandon it as a failed school reform idea, the authors conclude. But it is probably too late to stop the bus.

This study was commissioned to investigate issues related to the inclusion of the American College Testing Program (ACT) assessment within the Colorado State Assessment Program (CSAP). Analyses were carried out using assessment materials, assessment results, and various data from the ACT and the Colorado State Department of Education. One focus of...

The math/science pipeline in public schooling is best described as a phenomenon in which, beginning in late middle/junior high school, the number of female students, students with lower socioeconomic status, and students of color in proportion to White male students in advanced math and science progressively shrinks during high school. This article...

The general thesis of Walter Feinberg’s On Higher Groundis that affirmative action is a distinctive policy for the promotion of equal opportunity, based on distinctive historical considerations, and reserved for distinctive groups. Feinberg is clear that affirmative action is by no means sufficient for equalizing opportunity, let alone for achievin...

Over the last several decades, positivist-behaviorist approaches to social and educational research have been on the decline, whereas interpretive approaches have been on the rise. As a result of this "interpretive turn" the old debate between positivism and interpretivism (and central to the quantitative-qualitative debate) has diminished in inten...

Over the last several decades, equal educational opportunity has been eviscerated by the political right and has fallen into disrepute with postmodernists and the political left. Howe provides a vigorous defense of the "participatory interpretation" of equal educational opportunity, and employs it to critically evaluate several contemporary policy...

Over the last several decades, positivist-behaviorist approaches to social and educational research have been on the decline, whereas interpretive approaches have been on the rise. As a result of this "interpretive turn" the old debate between positivism and interpretivism (and central to the quantitative-qualitative debate) has diminished in inten...

This book is designed to develop a general conceptualization of equality of educational opportunity and to use it to characterize the problems confronting public education in the United States. It is argued that educational opportunities and educational results cannot be disentangled. After an overview in chapter 1, chapter 2, "A Radical Liberal Fr...

Incl. bibl.

Educational research has enjoyed special exemptions from formal ethical oversight of research on human subjects since the original mandate from the federal government that such oversight must occur. Although interpreting these exemptions has always been a potential source of controversy and conflict for university Institutional Review Boards, the b...

Liberal political theory in general, as well as liberal educational theory in particular, has been largely silent on the challenge posed by multiculturalism. This lacuna results from the tendency to conflate ‘‘cultural” and ‘‘political” communities and to conceive of equality exclusively in terms of the latter. The result is that equality of educat...

The quantitative-qualitative debate has been unfolding for several decades now and has evolved from one about the incompatibility of quantitative and qualitative techniques and procedures to one about the incompatibility of the more fundamental epistemological assumptions of quantitative and qualitative (positivist and interpretivist) "paradigms."...

Developing largely out of an awakened commitment to the ethical requirement that all individuals be provided with access to a decent public education, special education has had a strong ethical component from its inception. Because it challenges traditional organizational structures and the knowledge and skills of teachers, it has continued to enge...

The proliferation of qualitative methods in educational research has led to considerable controversy about standards for the design and conduct of research. This controversy has been playing itself out over the last several decades largely in terms of the quantitative-qualitative debate. In this paper we argue that framing the issue of standards in...

Whether, and how, children in the public schools ought to be educated about AIDS has generated considerable controversy. In a misleading way, however, the controversy has focused largely on sex education, to the exclusion of more general and fundamental questions about how moral‐political education should be formulated and conducted in a democratic...

To investigate empirical assumptions about substituted judgment, three treatment decision scenarios were presented to 43 competent elderly persons and 115 persons related to them. Related subjects who were explicitly asked to make a substituted judgment came significantly closer to the elderly person's preferences than those who were asked to make...

Over approximately the last 20 years, the use of qualitative methods in educational research has evolved from being scoffed at to being viewed as useful for provisional exploration, to being accepted as a valuable alternative approach in its own right, to being embraced as capable of thoroughgoing integration with quantitative methods. Progress has...

Although medical ethics has become a part of the curriculum of almost every medical school, medical students' perceptions of the value of medical ethics have not been documented. This paper reports the evaluations given by 137 preclinical and 216 clinical medical students to different levels of medical ethics teaching at the College of Human Medici...

Prospective hospital reimbursement based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) began in 1983 for Medicare patients, and many states are adopting similar systems for Medicaid recipients in an attempt to curb rising health care costs. Because of their unprecedented intrusiveness compared to previous cost-containment measures and because they explicitly...

The ability to formulate quick, accurate clinical judgments is stressed in medical training. Speed is usually an asset when a physician sorts through his biomedical knowledge, but it is often a liability when the physician assesses the sociocultural context of a clinical encounter. At the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, a...

Interest in ethics teaching within teacher education is growing. Refining this in terest and putting it into practice re quires addressing important questions about the nature and goals of ethics teaching, its content, and appropriate in structional methods. Using an example of an ethical dilemma frequently en countered by practicing teachers, Howe...

Educational researchers rightly puzzle about the relative merits of qualitative versus quantitative research methods and about the role that value judgments should play in the conduct of research. Unfortunately, discussions of these issues are often unproductive because they assume (albeit unwittingly) a positivistic epistemological framework. The...

Clinical judgment has traditionally been left to be acquired chiefly through personal experience and conversations with experienced practitioners. Given the explosion of knowledge and technology of recent years, a more systematic approach to managing information has become increasingly important. Ethical issues, both of a social and more individual...

To the Editor.— The criticism of medical ethics recently offered by Clements and Sider echoes that offered by Cheryl Nobel.1 The general point is argued again that the dominant approach to medical ethics—in which solutions to medical-ethical problems are obtained by employing the tools of traditional philosophical ethics—is untenable, chiefly beca...

As Congress prepares to reauthorize federal programs in educational research, there is a growing controversy within the field over whether advocacy has a place in such research. Beneath the surface are telltale signs of an especially disturbing new competitor in conceptions of the role of this research, one that jettisons the idea of educational re...

Traducción de: Values in Evaluation and Social Research

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University, 1985. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-212). Photocopy.