Education Policy Perils provides educators and those interested in the future of public education with research-based and practical analyses of some of the foremost issues facing public schools today. The collection, written by experienced scholar-practitioners, offers insights that include nuanced descriptions of various challenges facing educators and recommendations for overcoming them with an eye toward more successful policy and better implementation. The authors apply their expertise to a range of issues from international testing to policy challenges related to curriculum on the state and national levels. This volume positions ongoing debates within the wider context of an education landscape struggling to displace junk-science ideology with empirical research. The scope and sequence combined with the expertise of the contributors make this volume a vital resource for educators at all levels during a pivotal time of major changes in education policy.
This book examines how the use of the “at-risk” category and label creates problems for students and teachers. Drawing from research across various education sites, the author illustrates how educators recognize the label’s potential to redress issues of equity, but warns that it can also stigmatize the students so labeled. Brown explores how the labeling and subsequent practices by teachers and schools actually affect students, such as classifying many individuals as deficient. The text provides a historical overview, discusses the role of federal education policy and teaching, and includes tools to help readers acquire more complex, critical understandings of risk in educational practice. After the “At-Risk” Label not only challenges the education community to reorient itself to a more equitable discourse, it provides a framework for changing the structural conditions of schooling to better serve all students. Book Features: Offers a critical appraisal of how schools, policy, and teachers may be complicit in exacerbating conditions that lead to risk. Shows how race and class biases might be manifested in the “at-risk” identification process.Outlines a framework for making sense of, and acting in response to, risk that attends to both the individual and the institution. Provides a set of key questions, terms, and a list of extended activities in each chapter. “In this book, Keffrelyn Brown takes the common notion of ‘at-risk’ and turns it on its head. It is imperative that people who deal with children and teens grapple with the centrality of her notions. This is a must read!” —Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin–Madison “In this important and timely book, Keffrelyn Brown provides a much-needed basis for radically rethinking whether risk can be part of a critical social justice project in education.” —David Gillborn, University of Birmingham, UK “This book represents an audaciously genuine call to know more about, to see more in, and do more for students who have somehow amassed the label ‘at-risk!’” —H. Richard Milner IV, University of Pittsburgh
This is a book about what many teachers know but are increasingly being prevented from talking about: that real education always involves a risk. The risk is there because, as W. B. Yeats has put it, education is not about filling a bucket but about lighting a fire. It is there because students are not to be seen as objects to be moulded and disciplined, but as subjects of action and responsibility. The Beautiful Risk of Education is organised around a critical discussion of seven key educational concepts: creativity, communication, teaching, learning, emancipation, democracy, and virtuosity. By opposing the risk aversion that characterises many contemporary educational policies and practices, Gert J.J. Biesta makes a strong argument for giving risk a central place in our educational endeavours and brings risk taking to the forefront of a critical pedagogical practice.
Youth, Education and Risk: Facing the Future provides a provocative and valuable insight into how the dramatic social and economic changes of the last twenty years have affected the lives of Western youth. Covering young people's attitudes towards relationships and health, the authors provide a comprehensive perspective on young people in Western society in the 1990s. The book reviews ten years of research, policy and practice as related to the 15-25 age group and compares data from the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada. It also argues for the need to develop new research and policy frameworks that are more in tune with the changed conditions of life for Western youth. The book sets out the conceptual basis for a new approach to youth and the practical implications for research, education and youth policy in the new millenium.
When should children begin their digital diet? Does the use of new technology hinder or enhance children's literacy development? Do new technologies give children new abilities or undermine their skills and identities? Are learners safe in modern online educational spaces? Kieron Sheehy and Andrew Holliman have assembled expert contributors from around the world to discuss these questions and have divided the book into three parts: early engagement with new technologies: decisions, dangers and data new technology: supporting all learners or divisive tools global and cultural reflections on educational technology. Education and New Technologies focuses on aspects of education where the use of twenty-first-century technologies has been particularly controversial, contemplating the possible educational benefits alongside potential negative impacts on learners. Topics covered include: e-books and their influence on literacy skills games-based learning the impact of new technologies on abilities and disabilities learning analytics and the use of large-scale learner data cyberbullying intelligent technologies and the connected learner. A twenty-first-century book for twenty-first-century concerns, Education and New Technologies presents up-to-date research and clear, engaging insight about the relationship between technology and how we learn.
"When A nation at risk was published 20 years ago, it was seen as something of the Peyton Place of education reports: it stunned the establishment, readers threw up their hands and proclaimed themselves shocked by it, but no one could tear themselves away from reading it. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the original report, the Koret Task Force tells a no less compelling story."--Quatrième de couverture.
In this dynamic look at the current state of character education, Alan Lockwood assesses its strengths and weaknesses and finds fault with leading advocates for failing to respond to sound critiques of their work. Lockwood argues that contemporary character education can be significantly improved by using key principles from established theories and research on developmental psychology. He offers numerous examples to support his recommendations while inviting character education theorists and practitioners to generate their own implications from his presentation. This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in improving the quality of values-based education for children and adolescents.
What is actually happening on college campuses in the years between admission and graduation? Not enough to keep America competitive, and not enough to provide our citizens with fulfilling lives. When A Nation at Risk called attention to the problems of our public schools in 1983, that landmark report provided a convenient "cover" for higher education, inadvertently implying that all was well on America's campuses. Declining by Degrees blows higher education's cover. It asks tough--and long overdue--questions about our colleges and universities. In candid, coherent, and ultimately provocative ways, Declining by Degrees reveals: - how students are being short-changed by lowered academic expectations and standards; -why many universities focus on research instead of teaching and spend more on recruiting and athletics than on salaries for professors; -why students are disillusioned; -how administrations are obsessed with rankings in news magazines rather than the quality of learning; -why the media ignore the often catastrophic results; and -how many professors and students have an unspoken "non-aggression pact" when it comes to academic effort. Declining by Degrees argues persuasively that the multi-billion dollar enterprise of higher education has gone astray. At the same time, these essays offer specific prescriptions for change, warning that our nation is in fact at greater risk if we do nothing.
Risk Society and School Educational Policy explores the impact of risk society on policy in the US, UK and Australia through both practical and theoretical perspectives. The book develops an in-depth understanding of risk society itself, and guides the reader in applying this knowledge to the problem of how this impacts policy and practice in school education. Drawing on work by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, Rodwell explores the development of risk society as a field of interest, discussing its history, contemporary significance and links with neoliberalism, school education, and both mainstream and social media. He also examines its impact on government policies and the practical implications of how this impacts the educational experiences of children around the globe today. A book for policy professionals, researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in Education Studies, Theory and Policy, and International and Comparative Education, Risk Society and School Educational Policy is the first international academic monograph published in the field.
This book examines the gaps in creativity education across the education lifespan and the resulting implications for creative education and economic policy. Building on cutting-edge international research, the editors and contributors explore innovations in interdisciplinary creativities, including STEM agendas and definitions, science and creativity and organisational creativity amongst other subjects. Central to the volume is the idea that good creative educational practice and policy advancement needs to reimagine individual contribution and possibilities, whilst resisting standardization: it is inherently risky, not risk-averse. Prioritising creative partnerships, zones of contact, practice encounters and creative ecologies signal new modes of participatory engagement. Unfortunately, while primary schools continue to construct environments conducive to this kind of ‘slow education’, secondary schools and education policy persistently do not. This book argues, from diverse viewpoints and methodological perspectives, that 21st-century creativity education must find a way to advance in a more integrated and less siloed manner in order to respond to pedagogical innovation, economic imperatives and creative possibilities, and adequately prepare students for creative practice, workplaces and publics. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of creative practice as well as policy makers and practitioners.
