Download or read book Choosing Homes Choosing Schools written by Annette Lareau and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of policy shifts over the past decade promises to change how Americans decide where to send their children to school. In theory, the boom in standardized test scores and charter schools will allow parents to evaluate their assigned neighborhood school, or move in search of a better option. But what kind of data do parents actually use while choosing schools? Are there differences among suburban and urban families? How do parents’ choices influence school and residential segregation in America? Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools presents a breakthrough analysis of the new era of school choice, and what it portends for American neighborhoods. The distinguished contributors to Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools investigate the complex relationship between education, neighborhood social networks, and larger patterns of inequality. Paul Jargowsky reviews recent trends in segregation by race and class. His analysis shows that segregation between blacks and whites has declined since 1970, but remains extremely high. Moreover, white families with children are less likely than childless whites to live in neighborhoods with more minority residents. In her chapter, Annette Lareau draws on interviews with parents in three suburban neighborhoods to analyze school-choice decisions. Surprisingly, she finds that middle- and upper-class parents do not rely on active research, such as school tours or test scores. Instead, most simply trust advice from friends and other people in their network. Their decision-making process was largely informal and passive. Eliot Weinginer complements this research when he draws from his data on urban parents. He finds that these families worry endlessly about the selection of a school, and that parents of all backgrounds actively consider alternatives, including charter schools. Middle- and upper-class parents relied more on federally mandated report cards, district websites, and online forums, while working-class parents use network contacts to gain information on school quality. Little previous research has explored what role school concerns play in the preferences of white and minority parents for particular neighborhoods. Featuring innovative work from more than a dozen scholars, Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools adroitly addresses this gap and provides a firmer understanding of how Americans choose where to live and send their children to school.

Download or read book Choosing Schools written by Mark Schneider and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.

Download or read book The American Dream and the Power of Wealth written by Heather Beth Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the overwhelming evidence against them, many people still believe they can overcome the economic and racial constraints placed upon them at birth. In the first edition, Heather Beth Johnson explored this belief in the American Dream with over 200 in-depth interviews with black and white families, highlighting the ever-increasing racial wealth gap and the actual inequality in opportunities. This second edition has been updated to make it fully relevant to today’s reader, with new data and illustrative examples, including twenty new interviews. Johnson asks not just what parents are thinking about inequality and the American Dream, but to what extent children believe in the American Dream and how they explain, justify, and understand the stratification of American society. This book is an ideal addition to courses on race and inequality.

Download or read book Choosing Equality written by Joseph P. Viteritti and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the school-choice systems in Milwaukee and Cleaveland as a basis, author Joseph P. Viteritti reviews a variety of policy initiatives enacted to promote educational opportunity and finds that the nation has fallen short of providing decent schooling for its most disadvantaged children, and in so doing has delayed the movement toward social and political equality.

Download or read book Design Mom written by Gabrielle Stanley Blair and published by Artisan Books. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times best seller Ever since Gabrielle Stanley Blair became a parent, she’s believed that a thoughtfully designed home is one of the greatest gifts we can give our families, and that the objects and decor we choose to surround ourselves with tell our family’s story. In this, her first book, Blair offers a room-by-room guide to keeping things sane, organized, creative, and stylish. She provides advice on getting the most out of even the smallest spaces; simple fixes that make it easy for little ones to help out around the house; ingenious storage solutions for the never-ending stream of kid stuff; rainy-day DIY projects; and much, much more.

Download or read book The School Choice Roadmap written by Andrew Campanella and published by Beaufort Books. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 FOREWORD INDIES GOLD AWARD IN EDUCATION WINNER OF THE SILVER IPPY AWARD FOR BEST EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES You want your children to benefit from a great education. But every student is unique. One type of school might be a great fit for your neighbor's child, but it might not work for your son or daughter. Across the country, many parents today have more choices for their children's education than ever before. If you are starting the process of finding your child's first school—or if you want to choose a new learning environment—The School Choice Roadmap is for you. This first-of-its-kind book offers a practical, jargon-free overview of school choice policies, from public school open enrollment to private school scholarships and more. It breaks down the similarities and differences between traditional public schools, public charter schools, public magnet schools, online public schools, private schools, and homeschooling. Most importantly, The School Choice Roadmap offers a seven-step process that will help you harness the power of your own intuition—and your own expertise about your child's uniqueness—to help you find a school that reflects your family's goals, values, and priorities. Filled with sage advice from dozens of other parents who have pursued the school search process, and interviews with school leaders and teachers, The School Choice Roadmap is an optimistic, empowering book that cuts through the confusion in K-12 education—so that you can give your children every opportunity to succeed in school and in life.

Download or read book Unequal Childhoods written by Annette Lareau and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-09-11 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Choosing a School for Your Child written by U S Department of Education and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-09-17 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parents have a growing array of options in choosing a school, though the extent of the options varies from state to state. The enactment of the landmark No Child Left Behind Act of 2001; the rapid growth of the charter school movement; the increasing number of states enacting scholarship and tax credit programs for students to attend private schools; the expansion of privately funded scholarship programs for low-income children; and the growing acceptance of homeschooling have all increased the choices available to families. Parents can exercise choice in many ways. The most common way may be in choosing where to live based on the public school district or neighborhood schools. In many areas, parents can choose from neighborhood schools, charter schools or other public schools of choice, or transfer their child to another public school (in or out of district). They can also select a private school (religious or secular) or teach their child at home. Choosing a School for Your Child offers step-by-step advice on how to choose among the schools available to your child. It identifies important factors you may want to consider before making a decision. As you and your child visit different schools, you may want to consider the questions in each section of this book.

Download or read book School Family and Community Partnerships written by Joyce L. Epstein and published by Corwin Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

Download or read book Handbook of the Sociology of Education in the 21st Century written by Barbara Schneider and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook unifies access and opportunity, two key concepts of sociology of education, throughout its 25 chapters. It explores today’s populations rarely noticed, such as undocumented students, first generation college students, and LGBTQs; and emphasizing the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity and social class. Sociologists often center their work on the sources and consequences of inequality. This handbook, while reviewing many of these explanations, takes a different approach, concentrating instead on what needs to be accomplished to reduce inequality. A special section is devoted to new methodological work for studying social systems, including network analyses and school and teacher effects. Additionally, the book explores the changing landscape of higher education institutions, their respective populations, and how labor market opportunities are enhanced or impeded by differing postsecondary education pathways. Written by leading sociologists and rising stars in the field, each of the chapters is embedded in theory, but contemporary and futuristic in its implications. This Handbook serves as a blueprint for identifying new work for sociologists of education and other scholars and policymakers trying to understand many of the problems of inequality in education and what is needed to address them.

Download or read book The Just Right Home written by Marianne Cusato and published by Workman Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a guide to finding the perfect home, covering such topics as renting versus buying, mortgages, assessing neighborhoods, budgeting, evaluating a property's condition, and determining energy use and efficiency.

Download or read book Exploring the School Choice Universe written by Kevin G. Welner and published by IAP. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the School Choice Universe: Evidence and Recommendations gives readers a comprehensive, complete picture of choice policies and issues. In doing so, it offers cross-cutting insights that are obscured when one looks only at single issue or a single approach to choice. The book examines choice in its various forms: charter schools, home schooling, online schooling, voucher plans that allow students to use taxpayer funds to attend private schools, tuition tax credit plans that provide a public subsidy for private school tuition, and magnet schools and other forms of public school intra- and interdistrict choice. It brings together some of the top researchers in the field, presenting a comprehensive overview of the best current knowledge of these important policies. The questions addressed in Exploring the School Choice Universe are of most importance to researchers and policy makers. What do choice programs actually do? What forms do they take? Who participates, and why? What are the funding implications? What are the results of different forms of school choice on outcomes that matter, like student performance, segregation, and competition effects? Do they affect teachers’ working conditions? Do they drive innovation? The contents of this book offer reason to believe that choice policies can further some educational goals. But they also suggest many reasons for caution. If choice policies are to be evidence-based, a re-examination is in order. The information, insights and recommendations facilitate a more nuanced understanding of school choice and provide the basis for designing sensible school choice reforms that can pursue a range of desirable outcomes.

Download or read book Choosing a School for Your Child NSW written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Despite the Best Intentions written by Amanda E. Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers? Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students progress from elementary school to middle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latino counterparts. Most research to date has focused on the role of poverty, family stability, and other external influences in explaining poor performance at school, especially in urban contexts. Diamond and Lewis instead situate their research in a suburban school, and look at what factors within the school itself could be causing the disparity. Most crucially, they challenge many common explanations of the 'racial achievement gap,' exploring what race actually means in this situation, and why it matters. An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.

Download or read book Choosing Charters written by Iris C. Rotberg and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do charter schools strengthen students’ educational experience? What are their social costs? This volume brings together a group of premier researchers to address questions about the purposes of charter schools and the role of public policy in shaping the educational agenda. Chapter authors explore topics seldom encountered in the current charter school debate, such as the challenges faced by charter schools in guaranteeing students civil rights and other legal protections; the educational and social implications of current instructional programs designed specifically for low-income and minority students; the use of charters as school turnaround agents; and other issues that lie at the intersection of education, politics, and social policy. Readers across the political spectrum, both supporters and critics of charter schools, can use this book to inform public policy about the ways in which charters affect diversity and inequality and the potential to devise policies that mitigate the most troublesome social costs of charter schools. Contributors include Adam Gamoran, Jeffrey R. Henig, Henry M. Levin, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, Janelle Scott, and Kevin Welner. “This is an excruciatingly important work. At this point in time, it is essential to understand whether and in what ways charter schools contribute to segregation—and how they might avoid doing so.” —Mindy L. Kornhaber, Pennsylvania State University

Download or read book A Contest without Winners written by Kate Phillippo and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeing the consequences of competitive school choice policy through students’ eyes While policymakers often justify school choice as a means to alleviate opportunity and achievement gaps, an unanticipated effect is increased competition over access to coveted, high-performing schools. In A Contest without Winners, Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school. Throughout this journey, students prove themselves powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice. Phillippo’s work amplifies the voices of students—rather than the parents, educators, public intellectuals, and policymakers who so often inform school choice research—and investigates how students interact with and emerge from competitive choice academically, developmentally, and civically. Through students’ experiences, she shows how competitive choice legitimates and exacerbates existing social inequalities; collides with students’ developmental vulnerability to messages about their ability, merit, and potential; and encourages young people’s individualistic actions as they come to feel that they must earn their educational rights. From urban infrastructure to income inequality to racial segregation, Phillippo examines the factors that shape students’ policy enactment and interpretation, as policymakers and educators ask students to compete for access to public resources. With competitive choice, even the winners—the lucky few admitted to their dream schools—don’t outright win. A Contest without Winners challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.

Download or read book Our Kids written by Robert D. Putnam and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The bestselling author of Bowling Alone offers [an] ... examination of the American Dream in crisis--how and why opportunities for upward mobility are diminishing, jeopardizing the prospects of an ever larger segment of Americans"--