Download or read book Challenges of Conflicting School Reforms written by Mark Berends and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2002-03-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade ago, New American Schools (NAS) launched an ambitious effort forwhole-school reform to address the perceived lagging achievement of Americanstudents and the lackluster school reform attempts that have produced so fewmeaningful changes. As a private nonprofit organization, NAS set out tohelp schools and districts significantly raise the achievement of largenumbers of students by offering whole-school designs and design-basedassistance during the implementation process. NAS is currently in thescale-up phase of its effort, and its designs are being widely diffused toschools across the nation. During the 1997_1998 and 1998_1999 school years,RAND assessed the effects of NAS designs on classroom practice and studentachievement in a sample of schools in a high-poverty district. RAND foundthat high-poverty schools often have fragmented and conflicting environmentswith difficult and changing political currents and entrenched unions.Teachers in high-poverty schools tend to face new accountability systems andfluctuating reform agendas. These teachers generally lack sufficient timefor implementing reform efforts, often becoming demoralized and losing theirenthusiasm for the difficult task of improving student performance underdifficult conditions. RAND concluded that high-stakes tests may motivateschools to increase performance and to seek out new curricula andinstructional strategies associated with comprehensive school reforms.However, those same tests may provide disincentives to adopt richer, morein-depth curricula that can succeed in improving the learning opportunitiesof all students, particularly those in high-poverty settings.

Download or read book Challenges of Conflicting School Reforms Effects of New American Schools in a High Proverty District written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade ago, New American Schools (NAS) launched an ambitious effort for whole-school reform to address the perceived lagging achievement of American students and the lackluster school reform attempts that produced so little meaningful change. As a private non-profit organization, NAS set out to help schools and districts significantly raise the achievement of large numbers of students by offering whole-school designs and design-based assistance during the implementation process. NAS is currently in the scale-up phase of its effort and its designs are being widely diffused to schools across the nation. The purpose of this study is to examine the conditions of NAS classrooms compared with non-NAS classrooms and to study the relationships between classroom conditions and student achievement in a high-poverty district in San Antonio, Texas. The focus is on the conditions in the district, schools, and classrooms that promote or inhibit design implementation and changes in teaching and learning. Specifically, this study addresses the following questions: ̂Do the NAS designs extend beyond changes in school organization and governance and permeate classrooms? Do NAS teachers and students interact with each other and subject materials in ways that reflect the innovative curricular and instructional approaches of the design teams? ̂What factors at the district, school, and classroom level are related to implementation of designs, changes in classroom instruction, and student achievement?

Download or read book Facing the Challenges of Whole School Reform written by Mark Berends and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2002-04-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About a decade ago, New American Schools (NAS) set out to address theperceived lagging performance of American students and the lacklusterresults of school reform efforts. As a private nonprofit organization,NAS's mission was-and is-to help schools and districts raise studentachievement levels by using whole-school designs and design team assistanceduring implementation. Since its inception, NAS has engaged in adevelopment phase (1992-1993), a demonstration phase (1993-1995), and ascale-up phase (1995-present). Over the last ten years, RAND has been monitoring the progress of the NASinitiative. This book is a retrospective on NAS and draws together thefindings from RAND research. The book underscores the significantcontributions made by NAS to comprehensive school reform but also highlightsthe challenges of trying to reform schools through whole-school designs.Divided into sections on each research phase, the book concludes with anafterword by NAS updating its own strategy for the future. This book willinterest those who want to better understand comprehensive school reform andits effects on teaching and learning within high-stakes accountabilityenvironments.

Download or read book Toward Positive Youth Development written by Marybeth Shinn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This shows how to harness the power of settings, shifting the debate from simply enhancing youth outcomes at the individual level to improving the settings of youths' daily lives. It offers blueprints for creating and changing influential settings including classrooms, schools, universities, out-of-school time programs, etc.

Download or read book Leadership Lessons from Comprehensive School Reforms written by Joseph Murphy and published by Corwin Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process of understanding a text from the narrator s point of view is crucial for the tasks of interpreting and translating the Bible. If the translator s understanding of a narrative from the narrator s point of view is erroneous, then the whole process of translating the message into another language may also fall into error. This poses Bible translators a difficult challenge: How can we understand the narrator s point of view of the biblical stories which are culturally, geographically, and historically remote from our own? Understanding a text from the narrator s point of view must precede the translation process. In this work Hankore presents an argument for the intended utterance of Genesis 28:10 35:15 before proposing in brief how to translate it. By following this process, Hankore shows that a correct understanding of the concept of the ancient Israelite vow in the framework of a social institution is fundamental to reading and translating Genesis 28:10 35:15, and goes on to show how this same votive framework assist an explanation of the relevance of Genesis 34 to the Jacob story.

Download or read book Examining Comprehensive School Reform written by Daniel K. Aladjem and published by The Urban Insitute. This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban school reformers for decades have tried to improve educational outcomes for underserved and disadvantaged students, with the assistance of constantly evolving federal and state policies. In recent years, education policies have shifted from targeting individual students to developing universal standards for teaching and learning, and comprehensive school reform (CSR) has emerged as an effective key model. The federal CSR program seeks to support the implementation of comprehensive school reform, especially in high-poverty schools, and to improve efforts to help all children meet challenging academic standards. Schools that receive federal CSR funds must adopt approaches that comply with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This book provides a series of studies and reflections on CSR by leading experts in the field.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Education Economics and Finance written by Dominic J. Brewer and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 979 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics can be a lens for understanding the behavior of schools, districts, states, and nations in meeting education needs of their populaces, as well as for understanding the individual decisions made by administrators, teachers, and students. Insights from economics help decision makers at the state level understand how to raise and distribute funds for public schools in an equitable manner for both schools and taxpayers. Economics also can assist researchers in analyzing effects of school spending and teacher compensation on student outcomes. And economics can provide important insights into public debates on issues such as whether to offer vouchers for subsidizing student attendance at private schools. This two-volume encyclopedia contains over 300 entries by experts in the field that cover these issues and more. Features: This work of 2 volumes (in both print and electronic formats) contains 300-350 signed entries by significant figures in the field. Entries conclude with cross-references and suggestions for further readings to guide students to in-depth resources. Although organized in A-to-Z fashion, a thematic “Reader’s Guide” in the front matter groups related entries by topic. Also in the front matter, a chronology provides students with historical perspective on the development of education economics and finance as a field of study The entire work concludes with a Resources appendix and a comprehensive Index. In the electronic version, the index, Reader's Guide, and cross references combine to provide effective search-and-browse capabilities.

Download or read book Movements of Educational Reform written by David A. Escobar Arcay and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a public education world of vast, multiple, rapid, and often colliding educational reforms, Movements of Educational Reform provides the novice as well as the veteran educator and administrator a sort of map of educational changes and processes. Movements of Educational Reform is intended to help the devoted and dedicated education professional and scholar make sense of the successes and the pitfalls of reforms by tracing the landscape through four movements. Movements promises to ignite and energize your passion for leading educational reform and to bring awareness of system strategies and its structural and cultural aspects, many of which continue to challenge theorists, practitioners, and leaders of educational change.

Download or read book Expanding the Reach of Education Reforms Perspectives from Leaders in the Scale Up of Educational Interventions written by Thomas K. Glennan and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2000-10-28 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does one spread a successful educational reform? The essays here recount the authors?' experiences with the scale-up process. Among their lessons are the importance of building the capacity to implement and sustain the reforms, adjusting for local culture and policy, ensuring quality control, providing the necessary infrastructure, and fostering a sense of ownership. The process is iterative and complex and requires cooperation among many actors who must ensure that the results align with goals.

Download or read book A Nation at Risk written by Kenneth K. Wong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This special issue examines the underlying assumptions of the "A Nation At Risk" report, the context within which the Commission's work was situated, and the effects of the report in improving teaching and learning, as well as the performance of the public educational system. The purpose is to address three broad questions: Was America's education system really putting the nation at risk in the early 1980s? What is the legacy of "A Nation At Risk"? Given our current knowledge on education and human development, the report's overall concern is restated: What risks and opportunities lay before the nation today, and how will they affect the notion of a "learning society" and our public education system? Taken as a whole, the seven articles address the three broad issues identified regarding the past, current, and future of educational reform in the United States.

Download or read book Reevaluating Evaluation written by Laura M. Desimone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of the evolution of education program evaluation and the current emphasis on scientific precision, this special issue presents several of the challenges to program evaluation that scholars are facing today. In addition, it shares recent insights and experiences that will contribute to continued improvement of program evaluation and responds to the call for more exactness without losing sight of the lessons learned from evaluation over the past several decades. The eight papers address five main areas: evaluation design, instrumentation, implementation, politics, and analysis. As a whole, this issue is designed shed light on the five issues, as well as provide information useful for those interested in increasing the rigor of education research to increase the ability to improve schools.

Download or read book Success for All written by Yanyu Zhou and published by IAP. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a detailed account of an educational experiment in a middle school in Shanghai, China. The school, called Zhabei No. 8 Middle School (hereafter No. 8 School), is located in a run-down, lower working class district. Since the mid-1980s the school has experimented on an educational reform program called success education, aiming to help those at-risk students to be successful in school. This book illustrates how this educational experiment has been carried out and to identify experiences that could be learned by the international educational community. The book analyzes the critical role played by Principal Liu Jinghai, and particular attention is paid to the strategies adopted by the school to help enhance students’ self-esteem through integrating love and care throughout the school’s curriculum and activities. The pivotal roles played by teachers called “class directors” are meticulously studied, and efforts the school has made to collaborate with parents and the local community are examined. An ethnographic approach was used to gather data in this study. A combination of interviews, participant observation, and document analysis was applied to arrive at a systematic and complex understanding of this educational endeavor in China.

Download or read book International Handbook of Educational Policy written by Nina Bascia and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-05-14 with total page 1129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nina Bascia, Alister Cumming, Amanda Datnow, Kenneth Leithwood and David Livingstone This Handbook presents contemporary and emergent trends in educational policy research, in over ?fty chapters written by nearly ninety leading researchers from a number of countries. It is organized into ?ve broad sections which capture many of the current dominant educational policy foci and at the same time situate current understandings historically, in terms of both how they are conceptualized and in terms of past policy practice. The chapters themselves are empirically grounded, providing illustrations of the conceptual implications c- tained within them as well as allowing for comparisons across them. The se- re?exivity within chapters with respect to jurisdictional particularities and c- trasts allows readers to consider not only a range of approaches to policy analysis but also the ways in which policies and policy ideas play out in di?erent times and places. The sections move from a focus on prevailing policy tendencies through increasingly critical and ‘‘outsider’’ perspectives on policy. They address, in turn, the contemporary strategic emphasis on large-scale reform; substantive emphases at several levels – on leadership and governance, improving teacher quality and conceptualizing learning in various domains around the notion of literacies and concluding, ?nally, with a contrasting topic, workplace learning, which has had less policy attention and thus allows readers to consider both the advantages and disadvantages of learning and teaching under the bright gaze of policy.

Download or read book Charter School Outcomes written by Mark Berends and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sponsored by the National Center on School Choice, a research consortium headed by Vanderbilt University, this volume examines the growth and outcomes of the charter school movement. Starting in 1992-93 when the nation’s first charter school was opened in Minneapolis, the movement has now spread to 40 states and the District of Columbia and by 2005-06 enrolled 1,040,536 students in 3,613 charter schools. The purpose of this volume is to help monitor this fast-growing movement by compiling, organizing and making available some of the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K-12 charter schools. Key features of this important new book include: Expertise – The National Center on School Choice includes internationally known scholars from the following institutions: Harvard University, Brown University, Stanford University, Brookings Institution, National Bureau of Economic Research and Northwest Evaluation Association. Cross-Disciplinary – The volume brings together material from related disciplines and methodologies that are associated with the individual and systemic effects of charter schools. Coherent Structure – Each section begins with a lengthy introduction that summarizes the themes and major findings of that section. A summarizing chapter by Mark Schneider, the Commissioner of the National Center on Educational Statistics, concludes the book. This volume is appropriate for researchers, instructors and graduate students in education policy programs and in political science and economics, as well as in-service administrators, policy makers, and providers.

Download or read book Standards Based Reform and the Poverty Gap written by Adam Gamoran and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the latest in more than two decades of federal efforts to raise educational standards and an even longer stream of initiatives to improve education for poor children. What lessons can we draw from these earlier efforts to help NCLB achieve its goals? In Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap, leading scholars in sociology, economics, psychology, and education policy take on this critical question. Armed with the latest data and up-to-date research syntheses, the authors show that standards-based reform has had some positive effects, particularly in the area of teacher quality. Moreover, some of the critics' greatest fears have not been realized: for example, retention rates have not shot upward. Yet the overall pace of improvement has been slow, owing in part to poor implementation. Based on these findings, the contributors offer recommendations for the implementation and impending reauthorization of NCLB. These proposals, such as national testing and a rethinking of achievement targets, are sure to be at the center of the upcoming debate. Contributors include Thomas Dee, Laura Desimone, George Farkas, Barbara Foorman, Brian Jacob, Robert M. Hauser, Paul Hill, Tom Loveless, Meredith Phillips, Andrew C. Porter, and Thomas Smith.

Download or read book K 12 Education Concepts Methodologies Tools and Applications written by Management Association, Information Resources and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 1765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Primary and Secondary education is a formative time for young students. Lessons learned before the rigors of higher education help to inform learners’ future successes, and the increasing prevalence of learning tools and technologies can both help and hinder students in their endeavors. K-12 Education: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications investigates the latest advances in online and mobile learning, as well as pedagogies and ontologies influenced by current developments in information and communication technologies, enabling teachers, students, and administrators to make the most of their educational experience. This multivolume work presents all stakeholders in K-12 education with the tools necessary to facilitate the next generation of student-teacher interaction.

Download or read book Immigrants and the American Dream written by William A. V. Clark and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 2003-06-06 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has absorbed nearly 10 million immigrants in the past decade. This book examines who the new immigrants are, where they live, and who among them are gaining entry into the American middle class. Discussed are the complex factors that promote or hinder immigrant success, as well as the varying opportunities and constraints met by those living in particular regions. Extensive data are synthesized on key dimensions of immigrant achievement: income level, professional status, and rates of homeownership and political participation. Also provided is a balanced analysis of the effects of immigration on broader socioeconomic, geographic, and political trends. Examining the extent to which contemporary immigrants are realizing the American dream, this book explores crucial policy questions and challenges that face our diversifying society.