Download or read book When School Reform Goes Wrong written by Nel Noddings and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this much-needed volume, Nel Noddings uses her extensive experience at every level of schooling to challenge the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Noddings invites readers to think critically about the ideas underlying NCLB, the reform movement that shaped it, and the processes it has put into play. She considers such questions as, Is money the answer to raising test scores? Are failing schools mainly attended by poor children, or are all of our schools failing? Do all students need courses in advanced mathematics, physics, and chemistry? Should special education students be expected to meet the same standards as regular students? Does one standard curriculum serve the needs and interests of all students? Does our current system of schooling undermine the democracy it should support? This dynamic book: Challenges almost every provision in the No Child Left Behind Act. Argues for educationally justifiable interpretations of equality, accountability, standards, testing, and choice. Suggests an educationally and morally acceptable way of employing an enriched form of tracking to meet the needs of all students. Considers what is at stake for our children, schools, and democracy and offers suggestions for fresh thinking. “A must read for anyone who cares about our troubled public system of education.” —David C. Berliner, Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, Arizona State University “If you only have time to read one book, make it this one. Logical, lucid, wry, and wise, the book brings Noddings’s vast experience to bear on what’s wrong about current and recent efforts at school reform and what appropriate, humane reform might look like.” —Gerald Bracey, independent researcher and writer “Developing themes from her landmark volume The Challenge to Care in Schools, Nel Noddings provides a much-needed perspective on current educational reforms.” —Kenneth R. Howe, University of Colorado, Boulder

Download or read book When School Reform Goes Wrong written by Nel Noddings and published by . This book was released on 2007-08-27 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this much-needed volume, Nel Noddings uses her extensive experience at every level of schooling to challenge the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Noddings invites readers to think critically about the ideas underlying NCLB, the reform movement that shaped it, and the processes it has put into play. She considers such questions as, Is money the answer to raising test scores? Are failing schools mainly attended by poor children, or are all of our schools failing? Do all students need courses in advanced mathematics, physics, and chemistry? Should special education students be expected to meet the same standards as regular students? Does one standard curriculum serve the needs and interests of all students? Does our current system of schooling undermine the democracy it should support? This dynamic book: Challenges almost every provision in the No Child Left Behind Act. Argues for educationally justifiable interpretations of equality, accountability, standards, testing, and choice. Suggests an educationally and morally acceptable way of employing an enriched form of tracking to meet the needs of all students. Considers what is at stake for our children, schools, and democracy and offers suggestions for fresh thinking.

Download or read book Left Back written by Diane Ravitch and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-07-31 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this authoritative history of American education reforms in this century, a distinguished scholar makes a compelling case that our schools fail when they consistently ignore their central purpose--teaching knowledge.

Download or read book Confessions of a School Reformer written by Larry Cuban and published by Harvard Education Press. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Confessions of a School Reformer, eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. Cuban begins his own story in the 1930s, when he entered first grade at a Pittsburgh public school, the youngest son of Russian immigrants who placed great stock in the promises of education. With a keen historian's eye, Cuban expands his personal narrative to analyze the overlapping social, political, and economic movements that have attempted to influence public schooling in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. He documents how education both has and has not been altered by the efforts of the Progressive Era of the first half of the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s through the 1970s, and the standards-based school reform movement of the 1980s through today. Cuban points out how these dissimilar movements nevertheless shared a belief that school change could promote student success and also forge a path toward a stronger economy and a more equitable society. He relates the triumphs of these school reform efforts as well as more modest successes and unintended outcomes. Interwoven with Cuban's evaluations and remembrances are his "confessions," in which he accounts for the beliefs he held and later rejected, as well as mistakes and areas of weakness that he has found in his own ideology. Ultimately, Cuban remarks with a tempered optimism on what schools can and cannot do in American democracy.

Download or read book Educational Research the Educationalization of Social Problems written by Paul Smeyers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-04-14 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pushing ‘social’ responsibilities on schools is a process that has been underway for a long time. This phenomenon has been studied more in Europe than in North America and the U.K. and has been labelled Pädagogisierung. The editors have chosen to use ‘Educationalization’ to identify the overall orientation or trend toward thinking about education as the focal point for addressing or solving larger human problems. The term describes these phenomena as a sub-process of the ‘modernization’ of society, but it also has negative connotations, such as increased dependence, patronization, and pampering. In this book distinguished philosophers and historians of education focus on ‘educationalization’ to expand its meaning through an engagement with educational theory. Topics discussed are the family and the child, the ‘learning society’, citizenship education, widening participation in higher education, progressive education, and schooling movements such as No Child Left Behind. ‘Smeyers’ and Depaepe's book offers great insights into one of the most ambivalent phenomena of today's educational world and especially educational policy. The contributions assembled represent perspectives of some of the most respected scholars in the field. Their manifold critiques of the educationalization of social problems are rather convincing. Our time is definitely ripe for such analysis!’ Roland Reichenbach, Center for Educational Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland ‘This is a challenging, critical and analytical treatment of the tendency of contemporary administrations to overburden educational institutions with the expectation that they will provide the solutions to an increasingly diverse range of social and economic problems. It brings together the theoretical resources of a distinguished international group of philosophers and historians of education and deserves the careful attention of educational policy makers, practitioners and researchers alike.’ David Bridges, Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, England This publication is realized by the Research Community (FWO-Vlaanderen / Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium) Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education: Evaluation and Evolution of the Criteria for Educational Research. Also realized by the Research Community are Educational Research: Why ‘What Works’ Doesn’t Work (2006) and Educational Research: Networks and Technologies (2007).

Download or read book Revisiting The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change written by Seymour B. Sarason and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revisiting “The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change” provocatively and seamlessly joins Seymour Sarason’s classic, landmark text on school change with his own insightful re?ections on those same issues in the face of today’s crisis in public schools. This is an extensive, monograph–length revisiting. Part I of this book reproduces the second edition of Sarason’s ground–breaking work, The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change, in which he detailed how change can affect a school’s culturally diverse environment—either through the implementation of new programs or as a result of federally imposed regulations. Throughout, many of the major assumptions about change in institutions are challenged. Speci?c events and examples demonstrate that any attempt to implement change involves some existing regularity within the school. Dr. Sarason also takes a close look at government involvement in change efforts in schooling—and includes a detailed examination of current efforts to implement PL 94–142 into public schools. He presents compelling evidence that the federal effort to change and improve schools has largely been a failure. Also included are investigations into the purposes of schooling and how these purposes can be affected by change, and the process by which educators and administrators formulate intended outcomes of change efforts. In Part II, Dr. Sarason “revisits” the text and the issues 25 years after the original publication. As he explains in his preface, to him the word crisis means “a point in time when a dangerous situation contains con?icting forces of an intensity or seriousness that in the near term will be dramatically altered depending on which forces win out. When I wrote the book a quarter century ago, I did not regard our schools as in crisis...[though] my intuition . . . was that a crisis would come sooner or later. It has, in my opinion, come.” Believing that “what happens in our cities and our schools will determine the fate of our society,” Dr. Sarason is deeply concerned that the reform arena is being manipulated by forces that are at best untroubled by and at worst intent on the dismantling of the public school system. That, coupled with his fear that even the system’s defenders are not focusing on the real issues, has infused Dr. Sarason’s return to the topic of educational change with a great sense of urgency. The important things he has to say will be welcomed by all who truly care about the state of the public schools that America’s children attend.

Download or read book Bush Obama School Reform written by Frederick M. Hess and published by Educational Innovations. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction / Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane -- Testing and accountability: what have we learned and where do we go? / Deven Carlson -- The limits of policy for school turnaround / Ashley Jochim -- Incentives and inducements: the feds fight federalism / Patrick McGuinn -- Federal efforts to improve teacher quality / Matthew A. Kraft -- The Bush-Obama agenda for education research and innovation: major investment, mixed returns / Robert Pianta and Tara Hofkens -- Why standards produce weak reform / Tom Loveless -- Federal support for charter schooling: a presidential priority / Anna J. Egalite -- Challenging, building, and changing capacity in state education agencies / Sara E. Dahill-Brown -- Sound and fury: education and civil rights in the Bush and Obama administrations / Joshua Dunn -- Conclusion / Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane

Download or read book Slaying Goliath written by Diane Ravitch and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, Slaying Goliath is an impassioned, inspiring look at the ways in which parents, teachers, and activists are successfully fighting back to defeat the forces that are trying to privatize America’s public schools. Diane Ravitch writes of a true grassroots movement sweeping the country, from cities and towns across America, a movement dedicated to protecting public schools from those who are funding privatization and who believe that America’s schools should be run like businesses and that children should be treated like customers or products. Slaying Goliath is about the power of democracy, about the dangers of plutocracy, and about the potential of ordinary people—armed like David with only a slingshot of ideas, energy, and dedication—to prevail against those who are trying to divert funding away from our historic system of democratically governed, nonsectarian public schools. Among the lessons learned from the global pandemic of 2020 is the importance of our public schools and their teachers and the fact that distance learning can never replace human interaction, the pesonal connection between teachers and students.

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 Fatigued by School Reform written by Jack Jennings and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a half-a-century of school reform, a majority of Americans consider the public schools as worse today than when they attended school. Those reforms missed the mark because they were not focused on the backgrounds of the students’ parents--by far the most important indicator of students’ progress in school. The importance of parents was documented by the Coleman Report more than 50 years ago. School reform must be continued but re-directed to over-come the power of low parental socio-economic status. The best way to improve the schools is to create a better, fairer economy providing parents with good jobs and decent wages. In the meantime, good pre-school, after-school, and other aids are needed to help students from low income families. Teacher quality, although not as influential as the parents’ backgrounds, is the second most significant indicator of student success. Teachers, like parents, have not been the focus of the attention their importance deserves. In particular, teachers should be fairly paid, and their verbal and cognitive skills improved. The Coleman Report again documented the importance of those skills more than half-a-century ago. Instead, money, time, and effort have been spent on reforms that won’t bring about great improvement because they did not address adequately those two important factors.

Download or read book Screwed Up School Reform written by Bruce S. Cooper and published by R&L Education. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unspoken American promise is that each generation will lead a better, more successful life than the previous one. In earlier times, it was an education that provided the next generations a better life. For today’s children, though, decades of failed school reform have left a generation wondering if this promise has been broken.Despite policies, programs, and resources, American education does not live up to its expectations. In Screwed-Up School Reform, Richard G. Shear and Bruce S. Cooper reveal that generations of school reforms have actively worked to cure the symptoms of “broken schools,” but not the overarching, fundamental problems that permeate the system. Virtually an entire society has failed to understand the main problem with American education: children are rejecting its practices and conditions. But, the screwed-up education system is fixable, and it can be fixed now. If reformers focus instead on changing education’s foundation, then children will instead succeed at school and in their personal lives.

Download or read book Misguided Education Reform written by Nancy E. Bailey and published by R&L Education. This book was released on 2013-07-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Misguided Education Reform: Debating the Impact on Students argues for reforms that will help, not hurt, America’s public school students. Early childhood education, testing, reading, special education, discipline, loss of the arts, and school facilities, are all areas experiencing reform in the wrong direction. This book says “no” to the reforms that fail, and challenges Americans to address the real student needs that will fix public schools and make America strong.

Download or read book The Prize written by Dale Russakoff and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As serialized in the New Yorker, a roiling, behind-the-scenes look at the high-pressure race to turn around Newark's failing schools, with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Governor Chris Christie, and Senator Cory Booker in eyebrow-raising leading roles

Download or read book The Death and Life of the Great American School System written by Diane Ravitch and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how school choice, misapplied standards of accountability, the No Child Left Behind mandate, and the use of a corporate model have all led to a decline in public education and presents arguments for a return to strong neighborhood schools and quality teaching.

Download or read book Learning from the Federal Market Based Reforms written by William J. Mathis and published by IAP. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past twenty years, educational policy has been characterized by top?down, market?focused policies combined with a push toward privatization and school choice. The new Every Student Succeeds Act continues along this path, though with decision?making authority now shifted toward the states. These market?based reforms have often been touted as the most promising response to the challenges of poverty and educational disenfranchisement. But has this approach been successful? Has learning improved? Have historically low?scoring schools “turned around” or have the reforms had little effect? Have these narrow conceptions of schooling harmed the civic and social purposes of education in a democracy? This book presents the evidence. Drawing on the work of the nation’s most prominent researchers, the book explores the major elements of these reforms, as well as the social, political, and educational contexts in which they take place. It examines the evidence supporting the most common school improvement strategies: school choice; reconstitutions, or massive personnel changes; and school closures. From there, it presents the research findings cutting across these strategies by addressing the evidence on test score trends, teacher evaluation, “miracle” schools, the Common Core State Standards, school choice, the newly emerging school improvement industry, and re?segregation, among others. The weight of the evidence indisputably shows little success and no promise for these reforms. Thus, the authors counsel strongly against continuing these failed policies. The book concludes with a review of more promising avenues for educational reform, including the necessity of broader societal investments for combatting poverty and adverse social conditions. While schools cannot single?handedly overcome societal inequalities, important work can take place within the public school system, with evidence?based interventions such as early childhood education, detracking, adequate funding and full?service community schools—all intended to renew our nation’s commitment to democracy and equal educational opportunity.

Download or read book Rethinking School How to Take Charge of Your Child s Education written by Susan Wise Bauer and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you read only one book on educating children, this should be the book.… With a warm, informative voice, Bauer gives you the knowledge that will help you flex the educational model to meet the needs of your child.” —San Francisco Book Review Our K–12 school system isn’t a good fit for all—or even most—students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps “disability” labels on differences in learning style. Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged. This informed, compassionate, and practical guidebook will show you how to take control of your child’s K–12 experience and negotiate the school system in a way that nurtures your child’s mind, emotions, and spirit. Understand why we have twelve grades, and why we match them to ages. Evaluate your child’s maturity, and determine how to use that knowledge to your advantage. Find out what subject areas we study in school, why they exist—and how to tinker with them. Discover what learning disabilities and intellectual giftedness are, how they can overlap, how to recognize them, and how those labels can help (or hinder) you. Work effectively with your child’s teachers, tutors, and coaches. Learn to teach important subjects yourself. Challenge accepted ideas about homework and standardized testing. Help your child develop a vision for the future. Reclaim your families’ priorities (including time for eating together, playing, imagining, traveling, and, yes, sleeping!). Plan for college—or apprenticeships. Consider out-of-the-box alternatives.

Download or read book Reign of Error written by Diane Ravitch and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, an incisive, comprehensive look at today’s American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools. In a chapter-by-chapter breakdown she puts forth a plan for what can be done to preserve and improve our public schools. She makes clear what is right about U.S. education, how policy makers are failing to address the root causes of educational failure, and how we can fix it.