In this volume, a team of national experts address the major elements key to system redesign and long-lasting reform, describing in detail the steps needed at the community, school, district and state-level by which to achieve long-lasting reform.
In the second edition of Leading Modern Learning, A Blueprint for Vision Driven Schools authors Jay McTighe and Greg Curtis offer the reader a fully rethought version of their blueprint for major education reform. More than a simple refresh, this new edition incorporates new insights, thinking, and experiences to refine approaches to, and tools for, implementing effective modern learning practices in a department, school, or district. With new Notes From the Field elements, McTighe and Curtis highlight key observations from their work with schools, including how to avoid potential missteps, misunderstandings, and time wasters that inhibit progress when implementing reform. .
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.
A master story-teller, Dr. Jose A. Cardenas, offers us an insider's view of the 28-year history of school finance in Texas. Dr. Cardenas is the founder & director emeritus of IDRA & is the only person who has been actively involved in the entire school finance reform effort since the early days of the RODRIGUEZ VS. SAN ANTONIO ISD litigation when he was superintendent of the Edgewood Independent School District. More than a history, this book provides a blueprint for persons interested in bringing about future reform in schools & other social institutions. Beginning with a description of the Texas system in 1950, the account covers court cases, legislation, & advocacy efforts & concludes with the status & future of school finance reform. Personal vignettes sprinkled throughout offer glimpses of those special untold moments that impacted history. Much of this volume - including the myths of school finance & lessons learned - relate to reform efforts in other states as well. Dr. James A. Kelly, president of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, provides a foreword, "Fighting the Good Fight," describing Dr. Cardenas as a trailblazer & pioneer. (ISBN 1-878550-63-2; 1997; 387 pages; hardback) Distributed exclusively by the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA); 210-684-8180; FAX: 210-684-5389; E-mail: [email protected]; URL: www.idra.org.
Eisler employs the partnership model to modern education, providing parents and teachers with specific ways to apply her ideas to the teaching of school-age children. 40 illustrations.
This book offers an ambitious new system for evaluating, compensating, and providing professional development for school teachers and administrators. In this realigned system, new forms of accountability are introduced, but they go hand in hand with new rewards and access to enhanced forms of professional development. A bold and comprehensive plan that includes contributions from many leading researchers, A Grand Bargain for Education Reform is a crucial contribution to contemporary debates about education and the challenges it must meet in the twenty-first century. "This timely volume responds to President Obama's call for a renewed focus on teacher effectiveness as a central component of education reform. With thoughtful contributions from many prominent educators, it offers a range of ideas for improving teacher compensation, professional development, and accountability in our nation's schools." -- Representative George Miller, D-CA, chairman, House Education and Labor Committee, U.S. House of Representatives "A Grand Bargain for Education Reform advocates for increasing the professionalism of teaching by working with educators as full partners in school improvement. Although I don't agree with every recommendation in the framework, the substance of focused professional development, improving teacher evaluation, enhancing career opportunities for teachers who remain in the classroom, and differentiating compensation offers educational leaders an innovative path to improved teaching and learning." -- Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO "Considerable consensus has been built around the notion that a high quality teacher is the single-most important factor in a child's education. A Grand Bargain for Education Reform moves the discussion to the next level, proposing new ways to evaluate and compensate the men and women who play such a crucial role in determining the fate of modern school reform efforts." -- Joe Williams, director, Democrats for Education Reform "A perceptive educator focuses on the critical step to better schools: paying teachers more for teaching well." -- Lamar Alexander, U.S. Secretary of Education (1991-1993) "This book offers a dynamic collection of authors, whose combined experience and expertise is unmatched. Their collective message makes this book a good blueprint that school communities can use to build systems that will lead to great success for schools and children." -- Gerald L. Zahorchak, Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Theodore Hershberg is a professor of public policy and history and director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of Operation Public Education. Claire Robertson-Kraft is associate director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia and of Operation Public Education, and a former elementary school teacher.
Knowledge of the processes of educational change is said to be the missing ingredient in attempts to bring about educational innovation and reform. Whether these efforts involve grass roots innovation or large-scale societal reform, failure to understand and act on existing knowledge of the change process has accounted for the widespread lack of success in making educational improvements. This volume analyzes what is known about successful or productive change processes, and identifies corresponding action strategies at the individual, school, local and state levels. Included in this book is a major treatment of the topic of the 'ethics of planned change', a neglected topic in recent literature, especially since strategies for intervening in the change process are receiving more attention. This book is intended to be used by teachers in training and in service, teacher trainers, educational researchers, education historians and administrators.
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.
Almost fifty years ago the Coleman Report, widely regarded as the most important educational study of the twentieth century, found that the most powerful predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of a child's family. The second most important predictor is the socioeconomic status of the classmates in his or her school. Until very recently, the importance of this second finding has been consciously ignored by policymakers, and the national education debate has centered on trying to "fix" high-poverty schools by pouring greater resources into them, paying educators more to teach in them, or turning them into charter schools. At the local level, however, eighty school districts educating four million students now consciously seek to integrate schools by socioeconomic status. The Future of School Integration looks at how socioeconomic school integration has been pursued as a strategy to reduce the proportion of high-poverty schools and therefore to improve the performance of students overall. It examines whether students learn more in socioeconomically integrated schools--and pre-K programs--than in high-poverty institutions and explores the costs and benefits of integration programs. The book also investigates whether such integration is logistically and politically feasible, looking at the promises and pitfalls of both intradistrict and interdistrict integration programs. Finally, it examines the relevance of socioeconomic integration strategies being pursued by states and localities to the ongoing policy debates in Washington over efforts to turn around the nation's lowest-performing schools and to improve the quality of charter schools. Contributors include Stephanie Aberger (Expeditionary Learning), Marco Basile (Harvard University), Jennifer Jellison Holme (University of Texas-Austin), Ann Mantil (Harvard), Anne G. Perkins, Jeanne L. Reid (Teachers College), Meredith P. Richards (University of Texas-Austin), Heather Schwartz (RAND), Kori J. Stroub (University of Texas-Austin), and Sheneka M. Williams (University of Georgia).
