Download or read book Unraveling Reform Rhetoric written by Jeff Swensson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional public educators in the US have too little information about the free market of schooling, otherwise known as privatization/choice education. As a result, traditional public education colleagues have lost sight of where they are and how they got there. In this primer, educators, parents/caregivers, and policymakers are offered an examination of the forces and factors that undercut traditional public education and an inquiry into the primary purpose and quality instruction that distinguishes traditional public education from free market schooling. Without knowing about the educational misdirection fostered by free market schooling, traditional public education in the US cannot invest in continuous improvement necessary to enrich the futures of all students and our nation’s democracy. The time has come for traditional public educators to study how we got out on a limb. This book explores the nature of free market schooling and discusses the information that traditional public educators need to muster a defense of purpose, quality, social justice, and how to think. Practical and theoretical insights throughout this book focus on professional practice in traditional public education as the means by which colleagues can assert excellence on behalf of all students while thwarting the negative impacts of free market schooling.
Download or read book Failure of Corporate School Reform written by Kenneth J. Saltman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate school reforms, especially privatization, union busting, and high-stakes testing have been hailed as the last best hope for public education. Yet, as Kenneth Saltman powerfully argues in this new book, corporate school reforms have decisively failed to deliver on what their proponents have promised for two decades: higher test scores and lower costs. As Saltman illustrates, the failures of corporate school reform are far greater and more destructive than they seem. Left unchecked, corporate school reform fails to challenge and in fact worsens the most pressing problems facing public schooling, including radical funding inequalities, racial segregation, and anti-intellectualism. But it is not too late for change. Against both corporate school reformers and its liberal critics, this book argues for the expansion of democratic pedagogies and a new common school movement that will lead to broader social renewal.
Download or read book Disruptive Fixation written by Christo Sims and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. Disruptive Fixation is his account of how this "school for digital kids," heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. Sims shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes—often dramatically so. He traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. Sims offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.
Download or read book Conceiving the Future written by Laura L. Lovett and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics. Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.
Download or read book Presidential Healthcare Reform Rhetoric written by Noam Schimmel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed by the four Democratic presidents, Truman, Johnson, Clinton and Obama, who tried to expand access to and affordability of healthcare in the United States. It considers how they made such arguments, the ethics they advanced, and the vision of America they espoused. The author combines rhetoric analysis, policy analysis, and policy history to illuminate the dynamic nature of the way American presidents have imagined the moral and social bonds of the American people and their exhortations for governance and policy to reflect and honor these bonds and obligations. Schimmel illustrates how Democratic presidents invoke positive liberty and communitarian values in direct challenge to opposing conservative ideologies of limited government and prioritization of negative liberty and their increasing prominence in the post-Reagan era. He also draws attention to the ethical and policy compromises entailed by the usage of specific rhetorical strategies and their resulting discursive effects.
Download or read book Rx for Health Care Reform written by Ken Terry and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this readable and well-researched book, Ken Terry analyzes the current state of health care reform and finds it wanting. Instead of tackling the core problems in our failing system, he argues, politicians, insurance executives, and health care leaders have embraced ideologically driven initiatives that pursue impractical objectives or will take too long to bear fruit. Among these are such widely hailed trends as disease management, pay for performance, cost and price ìtransparency, î consumer-directed care, and health information technology, none of which will reverse the rising tide of health spending. What is creating this nightmare scenario, according to Terry, is the sheer profitability of the health care industry. Insurers, physicians, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and device manufacturers are all striving to maximize their profits, and there is no effective competition or regulation to restrain them. Only a complete overhaul of our system for financing and delivering health care can get us out of this mess, the author maintains. In the second half of his book, he presents a bold vision of how to do this: First, he says, all primary care physicians should join group practices that are large enough to take financial responsibility for professional services. And second, competition among those physician groups, based on cost and quality, should replace competition among health plans. There should be only one government-regulated insurer per region, he says, and it should have no role in managing care.
Download or read book Changing to Charter written by Rebecca A. Shore and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about educational leadership. It tells the stories of 7 educational leaders who made the difficult decision to change their school to public charter school status. Several of the stories are told by those leaders themselves. Their journeys span over 25 years in many cases. The authors also conducted follow-up interviews, dialogues, and investigations to investigate the keys to their sustained success over time. These leaders all possessed an unwavering commitment to their school communities and maintained unusual dedication to their stakeholders.
Download or read book Unraveling the Assessment Industrial Complex written by Michelle Tenam-Zemach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive critique of how the assessment industry and standardized testing adversely impact students, teachers, and society. The authors present the case that the interconnected developments of the testing industry and the Assessment Industrial Complex (AIC) have effectively anchored American schooling to testing. Using an antiracist lens, the authors deconstruct the AIC, exposing the neoliberal agenda of education reformers and how proponents utilize the rhetoric of testing, and the data extracted from them, to normalize the reliance on AIC systems. This critique further exposes education reformers’ ideological agenda, their hypocrisy, and how they grossly profit from the AIC at the expense of society’s marginalized and most vulnerable students. The COVID-19 pandemic, society’s racial unrest, and anti-testing movements have aligned to underscore the need to examine systemic oppression and the impact it has on society through our education system. This text exposes how standardized testing perpetuates these injustices and provides the opportunity to disrupt the systems they rely upon and bolster the societal resistance that is needed.
Download or read book Reliable School Leadership written by Jeff Swensson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trapped between an encroaching tide of privatization and a rocky theoretical shore, educational leadership in America’s public schools is ardently researched and professionally practiced, but frequently besmirched and poorly understood. Despite the intentions of public educators to engage all students with the original power of education, disconnections caused by mandates, ideologies, and theoretical fuzziness render educational leadership unreliable. The capacities necessary for school leadership to function reliably on behalf of all students are well within the grasp of present-day public educators. But, the action or agency sufficient to enacting educational leadership reliably is on hold. Educational leadership throughout US public schools is submarined when disconnections and ideological misdirection impede the primary purpose and the moral obligation of public education. To fulfill the promises of public education and restore the intentions of educational leadership requires that educators, policymakers, and proponents of US public education reimagine the interconnections that yield the primary purpose and moral obligation of public education. Functional educational leadership is examined throughout this book as the agency necessary and sufficient for public education to discard the forces and factors that impose unreliability.
Download or read book It s All about Learning written by Jeff Swensson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-01-09 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s All About Learning: The Struggle in Choosing Traditional Public Education or Privatization is a reckoning with the contemporary struggle over choice about learning in public education. The future for learning depends on choice aligned with one of two major perspectives: traditional public education or privatization education. The profound implications of this struggle are too important to focus on gadgets, technology, and adult-centric intentions, also known as “chasing rabbits.” Instead, this book examines the purpose, intentions, and consequences of the perspectives battling for control of learning and teaching. When this conflict is resolved, a choice for learning will emerge: how to think or what-to-think. Who will write the narrative for the history of the future of US public education that best serves all students and the democracy in which they live? A reckoning with the struggle over choice about learning is past due. This book makes it clear that the time has come for traditional public educators to bypass the marketplace of privatization education and prioritize student-centric learning in traditional US public education.
Download or read book Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-19 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2001, provides a truly general account of Francis Bacon as a philosopher.
Download or read book Unraveled written by Josh Blackman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six years after its enactment, Obamacare remains one of the most controversial, divisive, and enduring political issues in America. In this much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare (2013), Josh Blackman argues that, to implement the law, President Obama has broken promises about cancelled insurance policies, exceeded the traditional bounds of executive power, and infringed on religious liberty. At the same time, conservative opponents have stopped at nothing to unravel Obamacare, including a three-week government shutdown, four Supreme Court cases, and fifty repeal votes. This legal thriller provides the definitive account of the battle to stop Obamacare from being 'woven into the fabric of America'. Unraveled is essential reading to understand the future of the Affordable Care Act in America's gridlocked government in 2016, and beyond.
Download or read book Toward a New Era of Learning Untangling Our Next Public Education written by Wilson Winnitoy and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What will our next public education system and its schools be like? It is a good question, but not one, unfortunately, that is on everyone's mind, at least not for now. We are too busy trying to fix the system we have, too busy to look ahead. We do not have to look very far. Our next public education system, and its new approach to learning, is already revealing itself. It is visible in the pressures from parents and their ceaseless efforts to influence profoundly the quality of the experience their children have in school. It is visible in the creative efforts of many dedicated teachers and school administrators as they surmount, day after day, the dehumanizing tendencies of large-scale mass education. This book is a look into the future. We must rethink the meaning of the values and beliefs that drove the creation of the public schools over 100 years ago. We must translate them into a new kind of learning that responds to the challenges and opportunities of our time and place in history.
Download or read book Defining the Good School written by Jeff Swensson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-21 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deck is stacked against educators and parents/caregivers looking for educational adequacy in contemporary US education. Too often, satisfactory quality in the good public school is identified based on opinion, the dubious value of standardized test results, and marketing ploys. Moreover, the contemporary purpose of US education and the definition of educational adequacy are wild cards that prevent most from playing a winning hand. Finding the good public school is left to chance. This book initiates a search to transform this state of affairs. All students deserve a comprehensive public education that invests in the original power of education, dynamic instruction, and principled reasoning. This discussion tackles the barriers—the eye of the beholder, the tyranny of either/or, and standardized testing—that hobble the capacities of educators and students. Once these barriers are removed, the determinants of comprehensive public education—power, policy, and instruction—emerge. From these discoveries implications are derived that indicate how comprehensive public educationengages educators and students with a transformed definition of educational adequacy. The good public school depends on this and a complete readjustment of the purpose of US public education. This search enables educators and parents/caregivers to identify and establish the good public school without taking any chances.
Download or read book The Unraveling of America written by Allen J. Matusow and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book that William E. Leuchtenburg, writing in the Atlantic, called “a work of considerable power,” Allen Matusow documents the rise and fall of 1960s liberalism. He offers deft treatments of the major topics—anticommunism, civil rights, Great Society programs, the counterculture—making the most, throughout, of his subject’s tremendous narrative potential. Matusow’s preface to the new edition explains the sometimes critical tone of his study. The Unraveling of America, he says, “was intended as a cautionary tale for liberals in the hope that when their hour struck again, they might perhaps be fortified against past error. Now that they have another chance, a look back at the 1960s might serve them well.”
Download or read book Hypocrisy Trap written by Catherine Weaver and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-16 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores how the characteristics of change in a complex organization make hypocrisy difficult to resolve, especially after its exposure becomes a critical threat to the organization's legitimacy and survival.
Download or read book Du Bois on Reform written by Brian Johnson and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2005 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. E. B. Du Bois's 'reform writings'--with the intention of reforming immoral and unethical behavior--appeared in periodicals directed toward or written on behalf of the African American community. Now for the first time, Du Bois's reform writings, which span over fifty years, have been gathered into one volume. Each section is edited and introduced by Brian Johnson and they demonstrate Du Bois's contribution to advancing the social and moral dimensions of the African American community.
