Download or read book From Unequal to Unwanted Reforms Needed to Improve Public K 12 and Higher Education in America written by James "Jim" Taylor and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s system of education desperately needs reform: the system continues to struggle with engaging and teaching children of color––even as society becomes more diverse. A longtime educator offers a candid and unabashed account of education in America during the past 130 years and what should be done in the future. Dr. James “Jim” Taylor describes the system of “separate and unequal” during the Jim Crow era of history, as seen through his eyes as a black child. That glimpse provides both a personal and professional perspective of the events that shaped the system. But even though strides have been made, many “unwanted” students continue to face discrimination in the nation’s K-12 public schools and institutions of higher education. From Unequal to Unwanted: Reforms Needed to Improve K-12 Public and Higher Education in America calls for educators and policymakers to confront real issues, offering evidence-based strategies to create real reform. Educators and policymakers must collaborate to develop the full potential of all children––not treat some as second-class citizens––if America expects to take back its place as a world leader in education.
Download or read book The Imperfect Storm Racism and a Pandemic Collide in America written by James A. Taylor and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On May 25, 2020, a thunderous collision between racism and COVID-19 created an “imperfect” storm that revealed centuries of imperfections that were camouflaged in America’s society. After the murder of George Floyd, virtually everyone became clear-eyed and could see the imperfections in health care, housing, employment, criminal justice, and education. These institutions continue to hinder the upward mobility of people of color. James and Wandy Taylor, the owners of Taylor & Taylor Education Consultants, explore how systemic racism in public education has prevented many black and brown children from achieving their full potential. They explore how to: • bridge the culture gap between teachers and students in culturally diverse classrooms; • prepare teachers to succeed in multicultural settings; • ascertain the differences between divergent views of education. The authors also take readers on a journey through America’s past that begins with the Jim Crow era of the late nineteenth century when America had separate and unequal societies and culminates in the present where students learn together—but from teachers that are often biased. Discover the problems students of color face on a daily basis and arm yourself with strategies to eradicate systemic racism in our schools with the insights provided in The Imperfect Storm.
Download or read book Can College Level the Playing Field written by Sandy Baum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why higher education is not a silver bullet for eradicating economic inequality and social injustice We often think that a college degree will open doors to opportunity regardless of one’s background or upbringing. In this eye-opening book, two of today’s leading economists argue that higher education alone cannot overcome the lasting effects of inequality that continue to plague us, and offer sensible solutions for building a more just and equitable society. Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson document the starkly different educational and social environments in which children of different races and economic backgrounds grow up, and explain why social equity requires sustained efforts to provide the broadest possible access to high-quality early childhood and K–12 education. They dismiss panaceas like eliminating college tuition and replacing the classroom experience with online education, revealing why they fail to provide better education for those who need it most, and discuss how wages in our dysfunctional labor market are sharply skewed toward the highly educated. Baum and McPherson argue that greater investment in the postsecondary institutions that educate most low-income and marginalized students will have a bigger impact than just getting more students from these backgrounds into the most prestigious colleges and universities. While the need for reform extends far beyond our colleges and universities, there is much that both academic and government leaders can do to mitigate the worst consequences of America’s deeply seated inequalities. This book shows how we can address the root causes of social injustice and level the playing field for students and families before, during, and after college.
Download or read book Unshackled written by Clint Bolick and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clint Bolick and Kate J. Hardiman begin with a thought experiment: how would we structure a 21st-century K&–12 school system if we were starting from scratch, attending to contemporary parental needs and harnessing the power of technology? Maintaining that the status quo is unacceptable, they take a forward-thinking look at how choice, competition, deregulation, and decentralization can create disruptive innovation and reform education for all students.The US Supreme Court proclaimed 65 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that our schools must provide equal educational opportunities, but as Bolick and Hardiman argue we have yet to make good on that promise. School systems are bound to antiquated structures, outdated technology, and bureaucratic systems that work for adults, not children. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how ossified the traditional public school system has become. Today's ruptures in traditional learning create opportunity for reinvention. Unshackled explains that technology can redefine the ways students learn in and out of the classroom and highlights the benefits of expanding educational freedom so that families are able to choose an education that fits their child's needs.
Download or read book U S Education is in Trouble Let s Fix It written by Richard W. Garrett and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-07-17 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changes to Improve Schools is a book about educational reform. Richard Garrett has spent ten years researching the U.S. K-12 system to find things in need of improvements. The book has 17 chapters that cover a wide range of topics such as the performance of American students, classroom discipline, and apprehensions younger graduates face when deciding to pursue educational fields.
Download or read book K 12 on the Brink written by Tom Coyne and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-16 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask yourself this question: "What will my state look like five or ten years from now if K-12 education performance doesn't substantially improve?" The consequences of each year sending tens of thousands of unprepared kids into a harshly competitive world are already clear. They include rising social safety net spending (leaving less for infrastructure, higher education and other needs), worsening inequality, increasing social and political conflict. And with rapidly improving technology and intensifying global competition, they will only grow worse if America's K-12 education results don't substantially improve -- and quickly. This leads to a second question: "Why do so many school districts fail to improve, and what can we do about it?" Tom Coyne is a business executive who has seen dramatic improvements in K-12 performance in Alberta and Massachusetts, as well as the successful defense of the failed K-12 status quo in Colorado, where he has been deeply involved in education reform at the school, district, and state level. In K-12 On the Brink, Coyne describes the system that has generated the challenges we face today, and illustrates them with a number of case studies, based on his unique perspective as an experienced business executive who has been involved in K-12 for almost twenty years. He then identifies performance improvements initiatives that have produced impressive results, and explains why they can only work at scale if American business leaders become much more aggressively engaged with K-12 performance improvement.
Download or read book U S Education Reform and National Security written by Joel I. Klein and published by Council on Foreign Relations. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role. This report notes that while the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers. According to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science every three years, U.S. students rank fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other industrialized countries. The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion, says the report. Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education. The report proposes three overarching policy recommendations: implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security; make structural changes to provide students with good choices; and, launch a "national security readiness audit" to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness.
Download or read book Degrees of Inequality written by Suzanne Mettler and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's higher education system is failing its students. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being the best-educated society in the world to one surpassed by eleven other nations in college graduation rates. Higher education is evolving into a caste system with separate and unequal tiers that take in students from different socio-economic backgrounds and leave them more unequal than when they first enrolled. Until the 1970s, the United States had a proud history of promoting higher education for its citizens. The Morrill Act, the G.I. Bill and Pell Grants enabled Americans from across the income spectrum to attend college and the nation led the world in the percentage of young adults with baccalaureate degrees. Yet since 1980, progress has stalled. Young adults from low to middle income families are not much more likely to graduate from college than four decades ago. When less advantaged students do attend, they are largely sequestered into inferior and often profit-driven institutions, from which many emerge without degrees and shouldering crushing levels of debt. In Degrees of Inequality, acclaimed political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains why the system has gone so horribly wrong and why the American Dream is increasingly out of reach for so many. In her eye-opening account, she illuminates how political partisanship has overshadowed America s commitment to equal access to higher education. As politicians capitulate to corporate interests, owners of for-profit colleges benefit, but for far too many students, higher education leaves them with little besides crippling student loan debt. Meanwhile, the nation s public universities have shifted the burden of rising costs onto students. In an era when a college degree is more linked than ever before to individual and societal well-being, these pressures conspire to make it increasingly difficult for students to stay in school long enough to graduate. By abandoning their commitment to students, politicians are imperiling our highest ideals as a nation. Degrees of Inequality offers an impassioned call to reform a higher education system that has come to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, socioeconomic inequality in America.
Download or read book Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots written by Larry Cuban and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drastic reform measures are being implemented in growing numbers of urban communities as the public’s patience has finally run out with perpetually nonperforming public schools. This authoritative and eye-opening volume examines governance changes in six cities during the 1990s, where either mayoral control of schools has occurred or where noneducators have been appointed to lead school districts. Featuring up-close, in-depth case studies of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Boston, San Diego, and Seattle, this book explores the reasons why these cities chose to alter their traditional school governance structures and analyzes what happened when the reforms were implemented and whether or not teachers and students performed better because of them. “Provides useful perspectives on the complexities of educational change that is relevant to all kinds of school systems . . . of interest to elected officials, other policymakers, business leaders, and educators.” —Richard W. Riley, Former U.S. Secretary of Education “A ‘must-read’ for policymakers intent on improving the academic performance of children in America’s urban centers . . . offers important insight and an excellent overview of the reforms being tested in the six urban centers.” —Ted Sanders, President, Education Commission of the States “Every urban political official, indeed, every governor, business leader, and state legislator should study the urban school reforms described in this book” —James B. Hunt, Jr., Former Governor of North Carolina and Chairman, James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy “A ‘must-read’ for educators. This book clearly defines what it takes to make significant changes in urban districts” —Floretta McKenzie, Former Superintendent, District of Columbia Public Schools
Download or read book School Reforms Higher Education written by Mary Houghton and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Just Because You Can Does Not Mean You Should written by Eric Schiltz and published by Booktango. This book was released on 2014-09-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the history of government's interference with education and the use of technology in K-12 education. I give reasons why we should not be using technology in K-12 education.
Download or read book It s Time for a Change written by Matthew Lynch and published by R&L Education. This book was released on 2012 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China, Japan, and South Korea understand that well-educated workers are crucial for survival in the competitive global economy. Thus, they are placing enormous emphasis on education, ensuring that their students receive instruction not only foundational reading and math, but are also taught to think creatively and solve problems. Their youth are poised to take on and conquer the world. The U.S., on the other hand, is losing the battle. School systems are using more money but have less to show for it. Test results, especially among the lower socioeconomic classes, are dismal. America has extraordinary natural resources, a solid, functioning democracy, and excellent infrastructure, but unless we can reform our educational system to produce students who are able to take advantage of new technologies and compete in the global economy, we will cede our position as world leader. Its Time for Change: School Reform provides a no nonsense blueprint for reforming The U. S.
Download or read book A Nation at Risk written by The National Commission on Excellence in Education and published by . This book was released on 1983-04-04 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secretary of Education T. H. Bell created the National Commission on Excellence in Education on August 26, 1981, directing it to examine the quality of education in the United States and to make a report to the Nation and to him within 18 months of its first meeting. In accordance with the Secretary's instructions, this report contains practical recommendations for educational improvement and fulfills the Commission's responsibilities under the terms of its charter. The Commission was created as a result of the Secretary's concern about "the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system." Soliciting the "support of all who care about our future," the Secretary noted that he was establishing the Commission based on his "responsibility to provide leadership, constructive criticism, and effective assistance to schools and universities." The Commission's charter contained several specific charges to which we have given particular attention. These included: * assessing the quality of teaching and learning in our Nation's public and private schools, colleges, and universities; * comparing American schools and colleges with those of other advanced nations; * studying the relationship between college admissions requirements and student achievement in high school; * identifying educational programs which result in notable student success in college; * assessing the degree to which major social and educational changes in the last quarter century have affected student achievement; and * defining problems which must be faced and overcome if we are successfully to pursue the course of excellence in education. The Commission's charter directed it to pay particular attention to teenage youth, and we have done so largely by focusing on high schools. Selective attention was given to the formative years spent in elementary schools, to higher education, and to vocational and technical programs. We refer those interested in the need for similar reform in higher education to the recent report of the American Council on Education, To Strengthen the Quality of Higher Education.
Download or read book Burning Cash written by Justin A. Collins and published by R&L Education. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Common Core poised to markedly amplify the accountability stakes in public education, the pressure to post steep outcomes gains has never been fiercer. Unsurprisingly, flashy and expensive school improvement initiatives that promise quick fix solutions have become pervasively en vogue across the K-12 landscape. As Justin A. Collins compellingly demonstrates in Burning Cash, these flashy acronym reform plans provide for abundantly vivid theatre, but offer no muscle for the heavy lifting required to transform instructional quality. Collins pens a forceful case that despite the dizzying change swirling around the classroom walls, student engagement remains a fixture of a paramount importance. Taking a decided detour from the student engagement literature to date, Burning Cash spells out an entirely fresh means of numerically charting student engagement levels across all classrooms over time. Were the status quo to instead persist, a high school diploma will remain the end of the educational line for millions of schoolchildren. By reliably quantifying the nature of student engagement at the classroom level, teachers and administrators are supplied a powerfully telling barometer by which to gauge educational quality. Also left at educational leaders’ disposal are data-informed guideposts that illuminate the improvement work left to be done. As Los Angeles Schools’ John Deasy champions in the book’s foreword, when student higher-order thinking balloons and disengagement is eradicated, test score spikes are extreme and sustained, no matter the school district’s zip code. And that means the promise of the American dream is enlivened without additionally burdening deficit-riddled budgets.
Download or read book The Merit Myth written by Anthony P. Carnevale and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening and timely look at how colleges drive the very inequalities they are meant to remedy, complete with a call—and a vision—for change Colleges fiercely defend America's deeply stratified higher education system, arguing that the most exclusive schools reward the brightest kids who have worked hard to get there. But it doesn't actually work this way. As the recent college-admissions bribery scandal demonstrates, social inequalities and colleges' pursuit of wealth and prestige stack the deck in favor of the children of privilege. For education scholar and critic Anthony P. Carnevale, it's clear that colleges are not the places of aspiration and equal opportunity they claim to be. The Merit Myth calls out our elite colleges for what they are: institutions that pay lip service to social mobility and meritocracy, while offering little of either. Through policies that exacerbate inequality, including generously funding so-called merit-based aid for already-wealthy students rather than expanding opportunity for those who need it most, U.S. universities—the presumed pathway to a better financial future—are woefully complicit in reproducing the racial and class privilege across generations that they pretend to abhor. This timely and incisive book argues for unrigging the game by dramatically reducing the weight of the SAT/ACT; measuring colleges by their outcomes, not their inputs; designing affirmative action plans that take into consideration both race and class; and making 14 the new 12—guaranteeing every American a public K–14 education. The Merit Myth shows the way for higher education to become the beacon of opportunity it was intended to be.
Download or read book Unlearned Lessons written by Barbara Z. Presseisen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1985 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reforming the Reform written by Susan L. Moffitt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-08-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansive study of the problems encountered by educational leaders in pursuit of reform, and how these issues cyclically translate into future topics of reform. School reform is almost always born out of big dreams and well-meaning desires to change the status quo. But between lofty reform legislation and the students whose education is at stake, there are numerous additional policies and policymakers who determine how reforms operate. Even in the best cases, school reform initiatives can perpetuate problems created by earlier reforms or existing injustices, all while introducing new complications. In Reforming the Reform, political scientist Susan L. Moffitt, education policy scholar Michaela Krug O’Neill, and the late policy and education scholar David K. Cohen take on a wide-ranging examination of the many intricacies of school reform. With a particular focus on policymakers in the spaces between legislation and implementation, such as the countless school superintendents and district leaders tasked with developing new policies in the unique context of their district or schools, the authors identify common problems that arise when trying to operationalize ambitious reform ideas. Their research draws on more than 250 interviews with administrators in Tennessee and California (chosen as contrasts for their different political makeup and centralization of the education system) and is presented here alongside survey data from across the United States as well as archival data to demonstrate how public schools shoulder enormous responsibilities for the American social safety net. They provide a general explanation for problems facing social policy reforms in federalist systems (including healthcare) and offer pathways forward for education policy in particular.
