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 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 153 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 Charter School City written by Douglas N. Harris and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

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 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 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 Reign of Error written by Diane Ravitch and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 417 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, “whistle-blower extraordinaire” (The Wall Street Journal), author of the best-selling The Death and Life of the Great American School System (“Important and riveting”—Library Journal), The Language Police (“Impassioned . . . Fiercely argued . . . Every bit as alarming as it is illuminating”—The New York Times), and other notable books on education history and policy—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 Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch argues that the crisis in American education is not a crisis of academic achievement but a concerted effort to destroy public schools in this country. She makes clear that, contrary to the claims being made, public school test scores and graduation rates are the highest they’ve ever been, and dropout rates are at their lowest point. ​She argues that federal programs such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top set unreasonable targets for American students, punish schools, and result in teachers being fired if their students underperform, unfairly branding those educators as failures. She warns that major foundations, individual billionaires, and Wall Street hedge fund managers are encouraging the privatization of public education, some for idealistic reasons, others for profit. Many who work with equity funds are eyeing public education as an emerging market for investors. ​Reign of Error begins where The Death and Life of the Great American School System left off, providing a deeper argument against privatization and for public education, and in a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, putting forth a plan for what can be done to preserve and improve it. 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. ​For Ravitch, public school education is about knowledge, about learning, about developing character, and about creating citizens for our society. It’s about helping to inspire independent thinkers, not just honing job skills or preparing people for college. Public school education is essential to our democracy, and its aim, since the founding of this country, has been to educate citizens who will help carry democracy into the future.

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 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 Doomed to Fail written by Paul Allen Zoch and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2004 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Zoch argues that what Americans most need to improve schools is not necessarily better teachers but a wholesale shift in the way it thinks about who or what creates academic success.

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 697 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 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 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 How Schools Really Matter written by Douglas B. Downey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 176 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 Addicted to Reform written by John Merrow and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prize-winning PBS correspondent's provocative antidote to America's misguided approaches to K-12 school reform During an illustrious four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow—winner of the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the McGraw Prize—reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on everything from the rise of district-wide cheating scandals and the corporate greed driving an ADD epidemic to teacher-training controversies and America's obsession with standardized testing. Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary. Now, the revered education correspondent of PBS NewsHour distills his best thinking on education into a twelve-step approach to fixing a K–12 system that Merrow describes as being "addicted to reform" but unwilling to address the real issue: American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters—including "Measure What Matters," and "Embrace Teachers"—that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing. Addicted to Reform is written with the kind of passionate concern that could come only from a lifetime devoted to the people and places that constitute the foundation of our nation. It is a "big book" that forms an astute and urgent blueprint for providing a quality education to every American child.

Download or read book Demythologizing Educational Reforms written by Arthur T. Costigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are dozens of myths surrounding educational reform today, maintaining the school’s role in economic competitiveness, the deficiency of teachers, the benefits of increased testing, and the worthiness of privatization. In this volume, the editors argue that this discussion has been co-opted to reflect the values and worldviews of special interest groups such as elites in power, politicians, corporate educational foundations, and the media. Prominent educational writers tackle contemporary issues such as neoliberalism, suburban schooling, charter schools and parental involvement. They expose the "logic behind the talk" and critically examine these problematic beliefs to uncover meaningful improvements in education which are better grounded in the social, economic, political and educational realities of contemporary society.

Download or read book Routledge Encyclopaedia of Educational Thinkers written by Joy A. Palmer Cooper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Educational Thinkers comprises 128 essays by leading scholars analysing the most important, influential, innovative and interesting thinkers on education of all time. Each of the chronologically arranged entries explores why a particular thinker is significant for those who study education and explores the social, historical and political contexts in which the thinker worked. Ranging from Confucius and Montessori to Dewey and Edward de Bono, the entries form concise, accessible summaries of the greatest or most influential educational thinkers of past and present times. Each essay includes the following features; concise biographical information on the individual, an outline of the individual’s key achievements and activities, an assessment of their impact and influence, a list of their major writings, suggested further reading. Carefully brought together to present a balance of gender and geographical contexts as well as areas of thought and work in the broad field of education, this substantial volume provides a unique history and overview of figures who have shaped education and educational thinking throughout the world. Combining and building upon two internationally renowned volumes, this collection is deliberately broad in scope, crossing centuries, boundaries and disciplines. The Encyclopaedia therefore provides a perfect introduction to the huge range and diversity of educational thought. Offering an accessible means of understanding the emergence and development of what is currently seen in the classroom, this Encyclopaedia is an invaluable reference guide for all students of education, including undergraduates and post-graduates in education or teacher training and students of related disciplines.