Download or read book What is Wrong with Our Schools written by Daniel Buck and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""What is wrong with our schools?"" is the question everyone seems to be asking, or more like screaming nowadays. Standard answers point to everything from school funding to unions to bureaucracies and more. In this book, Daniel Buck provides a different answer: flawed ideas - ideas about instruction, curriculum, even human nature itself - are the root cause of American schooling's dysfunction. Touching on philosophy, contemporary educational stu.

Download or read book What Is Wrong With Our Schools The ideology impoverishing education in America and how we can do better for our students written by Daniel Buck and published by John Catt. This book was released on 2022-12-09 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What is wrong with our schools?" is the question everyone seems to be asking, or more like screaming nowadays. Standard answers point to everything from school funding to unions to bureaucracies and more. In this book, Daniel Buck provides a different answer: flawed ideas - ideas about instruction, curriculum, even human nature itself - are the root cause of American schooling's dysfunction. Touching on philosophy, contemporary educational studies, cognitive science, and his own experience in the classroom, Buck argues that so long as we build our system on incorrect first principles, all other reforms are for naught. In place of the progressive education that pervades our schools, Buck argues for a traditionalist approach - classic literature, direct instruction, sequenced curricula, clear rules and consequences - as the education we need for the future.

Download or read book Getting Education Right written by Frederick M. Hess and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Getting Education Right, Rick Hess and Mike McShane argue that America has too long suffered from the absence of a robust, coherent, and principled conservative vision for educational improvement. The book both diagnoses a problem and offers a solution. The problem? The right has too narrowly focused on school choice, campus speech, and shrinking Washington’s footprint, while the left has sought to subsidize and supersize the status quo. The solution? An education system imbued with shared values, respectful of family ties, and equipped for the challenges of the 21st century. Rooted in fundamental conservative principles, the book explains both how we got here and where we need to go when it comes to early childhood, K–12, and higher education. Eschewing performative polemics, this book offers a field guide to bringing education back to its formative mission. Readers from across the ideological spectrum will benefit from engaging with the provocative analysis Hess and McShane offer, whether or not they agree with the policies they propose. Education is the foundation on which America’s future will be constructed, and Getting Education Right provides a timely blueprint for that project. Book Features: A conservative vision for the direction of American education in early childhood, K–12, and higher education.A stimulating and informative presentation for audiences across the ideological spectrum.An explanation of what it means to be a conservative in education today applied to a series of crucial questions about American schooling.A readable and accessible text with plenty of anecdotes, provocative data points, and real-world solutions. Authors who are especially well-suited to this task given their prominence as influential conservative scholars and pundits.

Download or read book What s Wrong with Our Schools written by Michael C. Zwaagstra and published by R&L Education. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What's Wrong with Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them examines the status of public education in North America and exposes many of the absurd instructional practices found in all-too-many schools. Written by three experienced educators, this book provides readers with a direct window into public education. The language is straightforward, the case studies based on real events, and the research evidence clearly presented. With chapter titles like, 'Subject Matter Matters,' 'A Pass Should be Earned,' and 'There is Too Much Edu-Babble,' the authors systematically demolish the ridiculous fads that have taken hold of public education. As unashamed apologists for the importance of knowledge and content in school curricula, the authors clearly show why the views of romantic progressives, like those of popular author Alfie Kohn, fail to stand up to rigorous scrutiny. A consistent focus on common sense permeates this book and provides parents, teachers, and administrators with practical ways in which they can help improve public education. Anyone interested in the future of public education will benefit from reading this book. For more information, visit www.fixingourschools.com.

Download or read book IJER Vol 4 N3 written by International Journal of Educational Reform and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1995-07-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mission of the International Journal of Educational Reform (IJER) is to keep readers up-to-date with worldwide developments in education reform by providing scholarly information and practical analysis from recognized international authorities. As the only peer-reviewed scholarly publication that combines authors’ voices without regard for the political affiliations perspectives, or research methodologies, IJER provides readers with a balanced view of all sides of the political and educational mainstream. To this end, IJER includes, but is not limited to, inquiry based and opinion pieces on developments in such areas as policy, administration, curriculum, instruction, law, and research. IJER should thus be of interest to professional educators with decision-making roles and policymakers at all levels turn since it provides a broad-based conversation between and among policymakers, practitioners, and academicians about reform goals, objectives, and methods for success throughout the world. Readers can call on IJER to learn from an international group of reform implementers by discovering what they can do that has actually worked. IJER can also help readers to understand the pitfalls of current reforms in order to avoid making similar mistakes. Finally, it is the mission of IJER to help readers to learn about key issues in school reform from movers and shakers who help to study and shape the power base directing educational reform in the U.S. and the world.

Download or read book The American Dream and the Public Schools written by Jennifer L. Hochschild and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2003 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the issues facing public schools in America today in providing an equal opportunity education for its increasingly diverse population.

Download or read book Education Myths written by Jay P. Greene and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2005-08-04 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we fix America's floundering public schools? Conventional wisdom says that schools and teachers need a lot more money, that poor and immigrant children can't do as well as most American kids, that high-stakes tests just produce teaching to the test, and that vouchers do little to help students while undermining our democracy. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? Jay Greene provocatively shows that much of what people believe about education policy is little more than a series of myths advanced by the special interest groups dominating public education.

Download or read book Closing of the American Mind written by Allan Bloom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.

Download or read book Our Schools and Education written by James R. Lake and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ongoing saga of bureaucratic control, misuse of money and personnel, lies, and failures, not of the children but of the leaders, educators,and businesses that control education, author James Lake firmly presents the truth versus the ideology in this comprehensive book. Throughout Our Schools and Education: The War Zone in America, he includes the problems bureaucrats create and what we can do to reclaim our schools. He shows workable and realistic solutions to help answer the pressing problems facing our children. He invites everyone, teachers, parents, and the young and old, to be part of the positive effort instead of adding to the existing dilemma buy doing nothing, allowing the bureaucrats to continue to control massive amounts of money meant to help our youth. This book is an eye-opener and should be read by every American that believes in the educational traditions that have made our nation great. With the help of teachers, parents and communities we can set aside the educational socialism forced upon us by Washingto D.C. and revers our present direction, returning education to our communities. We must maintain the America that our parents knew and created and not succumb to being a one world government. We will teach our youth to love America and to cherish our history and what America has stood for. The key to this is our support for what is right for our children and our nation. Our schools must teach the three "R´s" but also history, science, the arts, technology, vocational classes, and give our youth a very broad and realistic education. We must not teach to a test nor national standards. This book exposes the problems and gives answers to the needed solutions that every parent and teacher should be aware and active in their implementation. Our Schools and Education: The War Zone in America identifies the problems and presents the solutions to these issues so that educational socialism will be done away with and our communities will once again control and direct our schools, reestablishing and maintaining the greatness that has been our nation´s. May God bless America.

Download or read book How Schools Really Matter written by Douglas B. Downey and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us assume that public schools in America are unequal--that the quality of the education varies with the location of the school and that as a result, children learn more in the schools that serve mostly rich, white kids than in the schools serving mostly poor, black kids. But it turns out that this common assumption is misplaced. As Douglas B. Downey shows in How Schools Really Matter, achievement gaps have very little to do with what goes on in our schools. Not only do schools not exacerbate inequality in skills, they actually help to level the playing field. The real sources of achievement gaps are elsewhere. A close look at the testing data in seasonal patterns bears this out. It turns out that achievement gaps in reading skills between high- and low-income children are nearly entirely formed prior to kindergarten, and schools do more to reduce them than increase them. And when gaps do increase, they tend to do so during summers, not during school periods. So why do both liberal and conservative politicians strongly advocate for school reform, arguing that the poor quality of schools serving disadvantaged children is an important contributor to inequality? It's because discussing the broader social and economic reforms necessary for really reducing inequality has become too challenging and polarizing--it's just easier to talk about fixing schools. Of course, there are differences that schools can make, and Downey outlines the kinds of reforms that make sense given what we know about inequality outside of schools, including more school exposure, increased standardization, and better and fairer school and teacher measurements. ​ How Schools Really Matter offers a firm rebuke to those who find nothing but fault in our schools, which are doing a much better than job than we give them credit for. It should also be a call to arms for educators and policymakers: the bottom line is that if we are serious about reducing inequality, we are going to have to fight some battles that are bigger than school reform--battles against the social inequality that is reflected within, rather than generated by--our public school system.

Download or read book The Public School Advantage written by Christopher A. Lubienski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Download or read book Bad Students Not Bad Schools written by Robert Weissberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are increasingly alarmed over our nation's educational deficiencies. Though anxieties about schooling are unending, especially with public institutions, these problems are more complex than institutional failure. Expenditures for education have exploded, and far exceed inflation and the rising costs of health care, but academic achievement remains flat. Many students are unable to graduate from high school, let alone obtain a college degree. And if they do make it to college, they are often forced into remedial courses. Why, despite this fiscal extravagance, are educational disappointments so widespread? In Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, Robert Weissberg argues that the answer is something everybody knows to be true but is afraid to say in public America's educational woes too often reflect the demographic mix of students. Schools today are filled with millions of youngsters, too many of whom struggle with the English language or simply have mediocre intellectual ability. Their lackluster performances are probably impervious to the current reform prescriptions regardless of the remedy's ideological derivation. Making matters worse, retention of students in school is embraced as a philosophy even if it impedes the learning of other students. Weissberg argues that most of America's educational woes would vanish if indifferent, troublesome students were permitted to leave when they had absorbed as much as they could learn; they would quickly be replaced by learning-hungry students, including many new immigrants from other countries. American education survives since we import highly intelligent, technically skillful foreigners just as we import oil, but this may not last forever. When educational establishments get serious about world-class mathematics and science, and permit serious students to learn, problems will dissolve. Rewarding the smartest, not spending fortunes in a futile quest to uplift the bottom, should become official policy. This book is a bracing reminder of the risks of political manipulation of education and argues that the measure of policy should be academic achievment.

Download or read book A Legacy of Learning written by David T. Kearns and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What's wrong with America's schools? Why can't we fix them? How did we wind up with dropout rates of 25 percent and graduates who can barely read and write? Why does the United States spend twice as much on education as the international average and wind up near the bottom of the barrel in global comparisons of student achievement? Why do we lag behind nations such as South Korea, Hungary, and Singapore? And how should we go about improving the situation? Answers to these questions lie at the heart of this volume. David T. Kearns and James Harvey contend we are fine-tuning failure. We have yet to break with the past in order to face a different and challenging future. Despite worshiping at the altar of "local control" we have managed to create cookie-cutter schools across the country. We have been sidestepping the transparent need for common expectations about what students should know and be able to do. Standards, the authors say, are not clear enough or high enough. Above all, we have met the enemy and it is us: all of us support "change" as long as someone else is changing. This book is a fascinating and provocative analysis of where we went wrong and what we need to do to get American education back on track. It defines the kind of education our kids deserve. It calls for a new definition of "public education" in which choice is taken for granted. And it outlines an action agenda to help parents and citizens make first-class schools truly their own. In the future, the authors argue, we should think of a public school as any other non-profit entity—capable of operating in the public interest free of the red tape now strangling public education. It should be paid for by the public and accountable to the public, with its charter or contract routinely revoked when it stops serving public purposes or fails to meet its performance goals.

Download or read book Wasting Minds written by Ronald A. Wolk and published by ASCD. This book was released on 2011 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a smart and tightly reasoned critique of the educational status quo.

Download or read book Only Connect written by Rudy Crew and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspiring new vision for America's public schools from one of the nation's top educators American fourth graders score twelfth in the world in math skills, after Latvia and Hungary. Our eighth graders are fifteenth, below Malaysia and Slovakia. And by the time they're fifteen years old, our students have slipped off the map—to twenty-fourth place internationally. If these stats don't make you angry or ashamed or plain sad, then at the very least they should make you afraid. If matters don't change soon, tens of millions of our sons and daughters will grow up unable to function—let alone compete—in a global economy. And the impact of that on all of us will be devastating. All is not lost, though, says Rudy Crew, who has headed some of the largest and most daunting school systems in America. Not by any means. Only Connect is a call for not just parents but the entire nation to reconceive our relationship with public education. If we're to survive, we must place our schools at the center of our communities and partner with them to produce children with the full set of the tools they'll need—personal, civic, and occupational as well as academic—to face the economic challenges that lie ahead. Much like Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat, Crew shows us the reality of our schools in a new century, and what we each must do to create the next generation of mature and conscious contributors to society. From parents who demand only the best from their children and their schools, through our teachers and administrators, all the way to Washington, D.C., everyone has a role in restoring American education and America's competitive edge.

Download or read book Failing at School written by Camille A. Farrington and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly half of all incoming ninth graders across urban districts will fail classes and drop out of school without a diploma. Failing at School starts with the premise that urban American high schools generate such widespread student failure not because of some fault of the students who attend them but because high schools were designed to stratify achievement and let only the top performers advance to higher levels of education. This design is particularly detrimental for low-income, racial/ethnic minority students. To get different results, Farrington proposes fundamental changes based on what we now know about how students learn, what motivates them to engage in learning, and what kinds of educational systems and structures would best support their learning. “This is a groundbreaking and eye-opening study because it does what few studies of high school truly do: get inside the hearts and minds of teen-agers and show what their experience of school looks and feels like to them. The analysis of students who fail is revealing and powerful. There are poignant and revealing stories of just how a few student mistakes or teacher insensitivities lead to unfortunate and long-lasting results. More importantly, these case studies, their nuances, and their implications take us beyond the clichés and simplistic theories about schools and reform. Most importantly, we read of tangible and intelligent solutions that can be instituted, based on the facts on the ground. I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in getting beyond the typical talking points of school reform.” —Grant Wiggins, Authentic Education “Camille Farrington details how high schools trap students along developmental trajectories distorted by structural factors—resources, values and practices—beyond their control. Grounded firmly in research, she describes a better way forward. This book is an important contribution to the re-visioning of American high schools.” —Ronald F. Ferguson, faculty director, Achievement Gap Initiative, Harvard University "Why is there such a pattern of failure in urban high schools? This is a vital issue for every city in America. Camille Farrington’s analysis of the roots of this problem and suggestions for structural changes to break this cycle is the best I have seen. This book combines research and practitioner wisdom with common sense and heart, and for those of us engaged in this work, presents concrete directions for positive change.” —Ron Berger, chief academic officer, Expeditionary Learning Book Features: Offers concrete strategies for redesigning high schools based on four dimensions of student achievement—structural, academic, developmental, and motivational. Highlights the voices of students to illustrate fundamental problems with the way we currently “do school.” Addresses the new Common Core State Standards and the potential of this major reform effort to move us toward equity and excellence. Camille A. Farrington is a research associate (assistant professor) at The University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and the Consortium on Chicago School Research and director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment for the Network for College Success.

Download or read book What The Academy Taught Us Improving Schools from the Bottom Up in a Top Down Transformation Era written by Eric Kalenze and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in the 2000s, a high-school principal in Minnesota, Dr. Bob Perdaems, faced a complex challenge. The demographics of his school were shifting, political tensions in the surrounding communities were rising, and, thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act's new testing and accountability requirements, his school's performance was soon to be scrutinized more intensely and more publicly than ever before. While he had several visions of how his school could continuously improve through these realities, however, he had no additional budget to bring his ideas to life.Undaunted, Dr. Bob set to creating school improvements the best way he knew how--and that, of course, he could afford: he prioritized his school's areas for growth, found teachers who would lend minds and hands, and gathered them to look at the blueprints. What the Academy Taught Us is a book about the collaborative school-improvement culture Dr. Bob created in his Minnesota high school: the principles that initiated it, the collective effort that kept it running, and the lasting effects it had on its teachers and students. The book also brilliantly explores how bottom-up approaches like Dr. Bob's fare in the current era, which seeks to transform schools through more top-down and 'disruptive' means. Ultimately, What the Academy Taught Us offers today's educators a way forward. While largely viewing the difficult work of school improvement through the prism of a single school, it presents abundant recommendations about how schools everywhere can build effective and continuous improvement from the bottom up.