In the United States, education is provided in public and private schools and by individuals through homeschooling. State governments set overall educational standards, often mandate standardized tests for K–12 public school systems and supervise, usually through a board of regents, state colleges, and universities. The bulk of the $1.3 trillion in funding comes from state and local governments, with federal funding accounting for about $260 billion in 2021 compared to around $200 billion in past years.
Teenage pregnancy, also known as adolescent pregnancy, is pregnancy in a female adolescent under the age of 20. This includes those who are legally considered adults in their country. The WHO defines adolescence as the period between the ages of 10 and 19 years. Pregnancy can occur with sexual intercourse after the start of ovulation, which can be before the first menstrual period (menarche) but usually occurs after the onset of periods. In healthy, well-nourished girls, the first period usually takes place around the age of 12.
James Samuel Coleman was an American sociologist, theorist, and empirical researcher, based chiefly at the University of Chicago.
Harold Tafler Shapiro is an economist and university administrator. He is currently a professor of economics and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Shapiro served as the president of University of Michigan from 1980 to 1988 and as the president of Princeton University from 1988 to 2001.
Peter Shawn Bearman is an American sociologist, notable for his contributions to the fields of adolescent health, research design, structural analysis, textual analysis, oral history and social networks. He is the Jonathan R. Cole Professor of Social Science in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, the President of the American Assembly at Columbia University, as well as the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE). He is also the founding director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and co-founding director of Columbia's Oral History Master of Arts Program, the first oral history masters program in the country. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.
Chester Evans "Checker" Finn Jr. is a former professor of education, an educational policy analyst, and a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education. He is currently the president emeritus of the nonprofit Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is also a Fellow of the International Academy of Education, an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution where he chairs the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He was also a member of the Maryland Kirwan Commission on Education during its authorization period from 2016 to 2019.
Robert Nicholas Serpell is a Zambian citizen and Professor of Psychology at the University of Zambia. From 2003 to 2006 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University. He also serves as the current Chancellor of Eden University in Lusaka, Zambia.
A bibliography of the history of education in the United States comprises tens of thousands of books, articles and dissertations. This is a highly selected guide to the most useful studies.
In the United States, sex education is taught in two main forms: comprehensive sex education and abstinence-only as part of the Adolescent Family Life Act, or AFLA. Comprehensive sex education is also called abstinence-based, abstinence-plus, abstinence-plus-risk-reduction, and sexual risk reduction sex education. This approach covers abstinence as a choice option, but also informs adolescents about human sexuality, age of consent and the availability of contraception and techniques to avoid contraction of sexually transmitted infections. Every state within the U.S. has a mandated AIDS Education Program.
Steven Forness is a psychologist doing research in the field of emotional disorders in children. His main interest is the "early detection and eligibility of children with psychiatric disorders for special education services in public schools". He has earned many awards and is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Jerome Bernard Karabel is an American sociologist, political and social commentator, and Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written extensively on American institutions of higher education and on various aspects of social policy and history in the United States, often from a comparative perspective.
Gerald Samuel Lesser was an American psychologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. Lesser was one of the chief advisers to the Children's Television Workshop in the development and content of the educational programming included in the children's television program Sesame Street. At Harvard, he was chair of the university's Human Development Program for 20 years, which focused on cross-cultural studies of child rearing, and studied the effects of media on young children. In 1974, he wrote Children and Television: Lessons From Sesame Street, which chronicled how Sesame Street was developed and put on the air. Lesser developed many of the research methods the CTW used throughout its history and for other TV shows. In 1968, before the debut of Sesame Street, he led a series of content seminars, an important part of the "CTW Model", which incorporated educational pedagogy and research into TV scripts and was used to develop other educational programs and organizations all over the world. He died in 2010, at the age of eighty-four, and was survived by his wife, a daughter, a son, and a grandchild.
Thomas S. Popkewitz is an Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education, USA. His studies explore historically and contemporary education as practices of making different kinds of people that distribute differences. He has written or edited approximately 40 books and 300 articles in journals and book chapters translated into 17 languages. Recent studies focus on the comparative reason of educational research as cartographies and architectures that produce phantasmagrams of societies, population and differences. The studies entail theoretical, discursive, ethnography, and historical studies that explore school, professional identities, and the relation to conceptions of differences inscribed childhood, learning and cultural differences.
Marjory E. Malo Mecklenburg is an American government administrator. She has served as an advisor for the Office of Technology Assessment and was appointed by Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, serving in the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs and serving as Director of the Office of Population Affairs until 1985.
Robert E. Lane was an American political scientist and political psychologist. He was the Eugene Meyer Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University. Lane taught there for nearly 50 years; during that time, he twice headed the department and helped lead the shift towards behavioralism.
Frank Folke Furstenberg Jr. is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the family in the context of disadvantaged urban neighborhoods and adolescent sexual behavior. Furstenberg has written extensively on social change, transition to adulthood, divorce, remarriage and intergenerational relations. Furstenberg is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Jeannette R. Ickovics is an American health and social psychologist. She is the inaugural Samuel and Liselotte Herman Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health and Professor of Psychology at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. She was the Founding Chair of the Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health and the Founding Director of Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE). She served as the Dean of Faculty at Yale-NUS College in Singapore from 2018-2021.
Juho Härkönen is a Finnish academic, currently professor of sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.
The federal government of the United States has limited authority to act on education, and education policy serves to support the education systems of state and local governments through funding and regulation of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education. The Department of Education serves as the primary government organization responsible for enacting federal education policy in the United States.
Carola Suárez-Orozco is a cultural developmental psychologist, academic, and author. She is a Professor in Residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard. She is also the co-founder of Re-Imagining Migration, a nonprofit organization.
