ABSTRACT
At a time when both federal and state governments have drastically altered how they fund and how they expect the nation’s welfare and public educational systems to function, the chapters by Deborah Stipek, Edward Lowe et al., and Phyllis Blumenfeld et al. remind us of how important it is to understand how these systems actually function. I begin my reaction chapter with a short overview of how these systems have been changed and what the assumptions underlying those changes seem to be. I then shift over to the common themes across these chapters in terms of how, they seem to suggest, the systems actually function. I then end this chapter with a discussion of the discontinuity between assumptions and actualities.
