Teaching Scholars for 2000-2001
Mark Cassell
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Biography
Mark Cassell was born in Frankfurt Germany in 1964 and moved with his
family to Los Angeles, California in 1970 where he remained through high
school. In 1982 he moved from the city of angels to the city on a hill;
enrolling at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he completed
a bachelors degree in economics and politics. From 1987 until 1990 Cassell
lived and worked in San Francisco, first as a paralegal and later as a
newspaper reporter. He began a masters degree program in public administration
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he emphasized urban policy.
He later enrolled in the Political Science Ph.D. program at Wisconsin
where he focused more broadly on his present research areas: comparative
political economy and public policy.
Cassell's research interests blend public administration with political economy as well as American and comparative politics. In 1993, he spent a year in Marburg, Germany conducting a study of immigration policy. Two years later, on a Social Science Research Council grant, he worked in Berlin as a research follow at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin, collecting data on the privatization of East Germany. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication at Georgetown Press. The manuscript is entitled "Public agencies in a private world: a study of the United States' Resolution Trust Corporation and the Federal Republic of Germany's Treuhandanstalt." Since coming to Kent, Cassell has published several policy reports including a study of wage trends in the state entiltled, "The State of Working Ohio" and a study of pupil transportation entitled "Taking Them for a Ride: An assessment of the Privatization of School Transportation in Ohio's Public School Districts." He is currently involved in a study of the Federal Home Loan Bank System.
The courses he teaches reflect the combination of research interests. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in political economy and public policy. He has also taught upper-division courses on globalization and privatization. In the coming year Cassell plans to teach introductory courses in American Politics and Public Policy.
Teaching
Project
His research project for the Teaching Scholars Program involves
the design and implementation of an evaluation of a distance learning
course he and a colleague will be teaching during the upcoming academic
year. An experimental design will be used in which the distance learning
course will be offered the same semester as a traditional (face-to-face)
section of the same course taught by the same faculty member. Professor
Caroline Tolbert will teach the distance learning and a traditional section
of American Politics in the fall semester 2000. The textbook, lecture
materials and exams will be the same (held constant) for both course formats.
In Spring 2001, Professor Cassell will simultaneously teach a traditional
and distance learning section of American Politics. The design provides
the maximum leverage to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of distance
education at Kent State, with implications for the larger Ohio public
university system.
