Susan S. Klein

Continuing the Journey Toward Gender Equity

Many contributors to this article started their journey to increase gender equity in education around 1972, when federal Title IX legislation was passed. Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance. This article discusses progress and future possibilities for additional useful research. After reviewing relevant goals, we address equity issues in the areas of the education workforce; student educational attainment and career achievement; formal curricula (including content and testing); and informal curricula (including classroom interaction, single-sex environments, sexuality, and family and child care issues). Although there has been progress in attaining equity goals in some of these areas, we conclude that there are many continuing inequities that merit exploration and resolution by educational researchers and practitioners. Additionally, there is a need for more systematic development of a comprehensive research and development agenda and a supportive national infrastructure to fund, promote, deliver, and achieve gender equity in education.

The Role of Public Policy in the Education of Girls and Women

In order to make education more equitable and effective for all, educators need to understand some of the complexities involved in developing public education policies to benefit over half our population which is female. A conceptual framework has been developed to indicate how different types of public policies have intended or unintended positive, mixed, or negative effects on girls and women in education. Examples of public policies that focus on sex equity goals, sex differential goals, and general education goals are followed by recommendations to help educators and policymakers assume responsibility for ensuring that education policies help, instead of harm, females.

The Convening Process: A New Technique for Applying Knowledge to Practice.

U.S. Department of Education staff created and evaluated a Convening Process to help educational administrators and policymakers make sound decisions based on practical experience, research, and evaluation in short periods of time. This article describes the background and rationale for the Convening Process and its relation to other efforts to increase the use of research and evaluation information. Convening Process experiences with the District of Columbia Public Schools and the State of Mississippi Department of Education are summarized and the impact of each experience is discussed. To guide future uses of the Convening Process, situational and procedural differences are analyzed. This analysis provides the basis for specific advice on replicating the Convening Process by explaining the operation of the key elements: (a) the identification of practical problems that can be resolved with currently available knowledge; (b) the use of consultant colleagues with appropriate expertise; and (c) the use of consultant groups to acquire, analyze, and exchange information with local stakeholders to arrive at recommendations based on consensus.

Are there better ways to identify and share the best within and among federal education programs

Abstract After describing inadequacies of current ED funding strategies in identifying and sharing the best of the R&D-based solutions, this article outlines an alternative vision centered on using evaluation to guide replication. This vision builds on some, but is quite different from most, of the Departments approaches to development, demonstration, evaluation, and dissemination. It concludes with a discussion of how to overcome constraints involved in implementing this new vision for federal education leadership.

Tilling Fertile Soil Principles to Guide Transplants From Agriculture to Education Dissemination

This article describes how the U.S. Department of Agricultures Cooperative Extension Service (CES) might serve as a model for improving the dissemination of education research and development results. It is based on a paper prepared for the House Subcommittee on Select Education in the U.S. Congress, to assist the reauthorization of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in the U.S. Department of Education. After reviewing the distinctive aspects of each dissemination system, the author lists various features of CES that might be replicated and others that should be avoided.

The Issue: Sex Equity and Sexuality in Education.

Neither sex equity nor sexuality are new topics to educators, but relatively little attention has been given to their combination. The contributors to this issue of the Peabody Journal of Education believe that it is necessary for educators to increase their understanding of ways that sex education can be sex equitable and ways that sexuality contributes to sex inequities in general education. There is substantial evidence that sex equity and sex education experts have gone their separate ways and generally either ignored or distanced themselves from each other. Most sex educators in the United States