Why do some events catch fire in the news, producing a media storm, while many similar events go all but unnoticed? This Element uses a fire triangle analogy to explain the necessary conditions of media storms. The “heat” is the spark: a dramatic event or discovery. The “fuel” is the political and cultural landscape, including similar items in recent news, and current debates that allow the event to be framed in a resonant way. The “oxygen” is the available news agenda space, plus attentio...

Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on "balloon boy?"With Making the News, Amber Boydstun offers...

An urgent case for protecting public education, from one of America's best-known education expertsIn this landmark book, Diane Ravitch - former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum - examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today's most popular ideas for restructuring schools, incl...

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts. Presenting research-based solutions, Iris Bohnet hands us the tools we need to move ...

Two of the most respected voices in education and a team of young education scholars identify 50 myths and lies that threaten America's public schools. With hard-hitting information and a touch of comic relief, Berliner, Glass, and their Associates separate fact from fiction in this comprehensive look at modern education reform. They explain how the mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain fro...

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are b...

We live in a world where seemingly everything can be measured. We rely on indicators to translate social phenomena into simple, quantified terms, which in turn can be used to guide individuals, organizations, and governments in establishing policy. Yet counting things requires finding a way to make them comparable. And in the process of translating the confusion of social life into neat categories, we inevitably strip it of context and meaning—and risk hiding or distorting as much as we re...

The U.S. is the world´s biggest jailor and one of the most affluent murderous countries, and yet its citizens pay more taxes to sustain law and order than their European counterparts. Yet, the U.S. has the most data in the world on the use of incarceration and its failure. Its researchers have identified more projects able to prevent violence than the rest of the world put together. Its legislators have access to pioneering data banks on cost effective ways to use taxes to reduce crime. We...

Are humans fair by nature? Why do we often willingly trust strangers or cooperate with them even if those actions leave us vulnerable to exploitation? Does this natural inclination towards fairness or trust have implications in the market-place? Traditional economic theory would perhaps think not, perceiving human interaction as self-interested at heart. There is increasing evidence however that social norms and norm-driven behaviour such as a preference for fairness, generosity or trust h...

For decades we've been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there's still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they're doing is actually working. But what does that mean in practice?High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation's...

Criminal law efficiency is a concept often referred to but seldom defined. Clarity, the author argues, is necessary for finding practical solutions to fundamental challenges in this area of law, especially with the criminal justice system itself at risk.Tina Søreide offers views in contrast to mainstream ideas on optimal criminal law responses to corruption, with emphasis on the fundamental role of the criminal justice system in the fight against corruption, and the effect this can...

A framework for anticipating and managing cultural differences at the negotiating tableIn today's global environment, negotiators who understand cultural differences and negotiation fundamentals have a decided advantage at the bargaining table. This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Negotiating Globally explains how culture affects negotiators' assumptions about when and how to negotiate, their interests and priorities, and their strategies. It exp...