[PDF] Making School Reform Happen eBook

Author : Pamela Bullard
Publisher : Allyn & Bacon
Page : 472 pages
File Size : 31,15 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Education
ISBN :

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Here at last is a book with a vision - not of what's wrong in American schools or what should be done to improve them - but about what is actually being accomplished right now in schools across the country that are committed to teaching all children. This is a book about what works... and about the positive changes that take place when everyone involved in children's education joins ranks to create schools committed to teaching so that children learn. It is an important book - providing both a roadmap and a source of inspiration for parents, teachers, school administrators, Boards of Education, and those who care about children and their education. The success stories recounted here are amazing - test scores that catapult the performance of a school district from the bottom of the barrel to well above average performance in just a few years... schools once plagued by vandalism and disorderly students now beehives of educational activity and enthusiasm... parents who have become involved because they appreciate the welcoming atmosphere of their children's school. The Effective School movement began with an article published by Ron Edmonds in 1979 and has spread to dozens of motivated school systems throughout the U.S. The core of the program is seven "correlates" - guiding principles that underlie the Effective Schools improvement process. At the heart of this philosophy is the conviction that all children, regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or gender, can learn... and the commitment to creating schools that challenge and nurture and get results. What kind of community can create this kind of school? Any community that has the will to make the necessary changes, say educators whohave succeeded. Although the changes aren't always easy, the results are undeniable. There are shining examples of effective schools across the country, from the Spanish Harlem area of New York City... to the schools of Junction City, Kansas, with its many mobile children of the military... the suburban schools of Frederick County Maryland... and the once-neglected Hollibrook Elementary School in Spring Branch, Texas. The stories of schools and school systems that have implemented an Effective Schools program are told here in the participant's own words. To this account, the authors interviewed over 450 people - teachers, parents, administrators, psychologists, government officials, and scores of others - and visited dozens of schools across the country - urban, suburban, and rural. The result is a book that shows exactly what's involved in initiating, implementing, and making educational reform work.

Author : John Merrow
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 37,82 MB
Release : 2017-08-15
Category : Education
ISBN : 1620972433

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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.

Author : Seymour B. Sarason
Publisher : Teachers College Press
Page : 747 pages
File Size : 29,26 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Education
ISBN : 0807776475

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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.

Author : OECD
Publisher : OECD Publishing
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 43,77 MB
Release : 2015-01-19
Category :
ISBN : 9264225447

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This book provides comparative analysis of policy reforms, and reviews individual country education policy approaches in a succinct format.

Author : Amanda Datnow
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 23,76 MB
Release : 2005-11-02
Category : Education
ISBN : 1134550723

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In an effort to improve student achievement, thousands of US schools have adopted school reform models devised externally by universities and other organizations. Such models have been successful in improving individual schools or groups of schools, but what happens when educational reform attempts to extend from one school to many? Through qualitative data from several studies, this book explores what happens when school reform 'goes to scale'. Topics covered include: *why and how schools are adopting reforms *the influence of the local context and wider constraints on the implementation of reform *teachers and principals as change agents in schools *the evolution of reform design teams *the implementation, sustainability and expiration of reform, and its impact on educational change Each chapter concludes with guidelines for policy and practice. This book will be of interest to educational leaders and staff developers, educational researchers and policy makers, in the US and internationally.

Author : Diane Ravitch
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 31,17 MB
Release : 2020-01-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0525655387

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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.

Author : Joel I. Klein
Publisher : Council on Foreign Relations
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 37,39 MB
Release : 2014-05-14
Category : Education
ISBN : 087609521X

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The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role. This report notes that while the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers. According to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science every three years, U.S. students rank fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other industrialized countries. The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion, says the report. Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education. The report proposes three overarching policy recommendations: implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security; make structural changes to provide students with good choices; and, launch a "national security readiness audit" to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness.

Author : Darlene Leiding
Publisher : R&L Education
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 40,88 MB
Release : 2009-10-16
Category : Education
ISBN : 1607094088

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Public education in the United States does not fulfill either the educational needs or the social needs of children. Its deficiencies have serious negative consequences in our political system, our economy, and within our social and cultural affairs. We must seek to improve education through research, policy analysis, and the development of alternatives to existing policies and practices. Educational reform should include promoting greater parental choice in education, a competitive educational industry, and other policies that address the problems of both public and private schools. The ultimate goal is improved student achievement, especially in our nation's cities, where large numbers of students, are not reaching the levels of achievement they need in order to live successful lives as adults. This book explores some of the unique characteristics of school reform and focuses on the role of poverty in reform, including the negative effects of low-income neighborhoods on the youth who reside there, concluding that reducing poverty can lead to more positive academic behavior and success. Reform Can Make a Difference enables readers to look at different reform programs that are available for schools and determine which model, if any, will fit their needs. The book assists schools in designing their own reform model that will help address issues students and families have with public schools.

Author : OECD
Publisher : OECD Publishing
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 26,7 MB
Release : 2010-05-26
Category :
ISBN : 9264086293

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This collection of essays analyses the reform experiences of the 30 OECD countries in nine major policy domains in order to identify lessons, pitfalls and strategies that may help foster policy reform in the future.

Author : John E. Chubb
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 22,58 MB
Release : 2011-09-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0815717261

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During the 1980s, widespread dissatisfaction with America's schools gave rise to a powerful movement for educational change, and the nation's political institutions responded with aggressive reforms. Chubb and Moe argue that these reforms are destined to fail because they do not get to the root of the problem. The fundamental causes of poor academic performance, they claim, are not to be found in the schools, but rather in the institutions of direct democratic control by which the schools have traditionally been governed. Reformers fail to solve the problem-when the institutions ARE the problem. The authors recommend a new system of public education, built around parent-student choice and school competition, that would promote school autonomy—thus providing a firm foundation for genuine school improvement and superior student achievement.