Witnesses: Jeb Bush, Governor of the State of Florida; Richard W. Riley, Secretary, Department of Education; George V. Voinovich, U.S. Senator from the State of Ohio; Dwight Evans, a State Representative from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; Virginia Markell, President, National PTA; John T. Walton, Co-Chairman of the Children's Scholarship Fund; and Rose Blassingame and Vermont White, Washington Scholarship Fund.
This book examines the complexity of effective, large-scale, and sustainable education reform through a historical analysis of the Success for All Foundation, an organization that has collaborated with thousands of elementary schools across the US to enact a common design for comprehensive school reform, all in the effort to improve the reading achievement of millions of students. The purpose of the book is to develop an analytic framework to assist education reformers in seeing and confronting complexity in their own improvement efforts.
Focuses on the purposes of bilingual education programs in schools and their historical development from the 1960s to the present. In this timely resource, educator Rosa Castro Feinberg surveys the developing field of bilingual education—its history, its theories, its practices, and the conflicts that swirl around it. She begins with an annotated chronology that describes influential people and events and traces themes in bilingual education from precolonial times to the present. In three detailed chapters, Feinberg summarizes the widely varied state and local policies and bilingual programs across the country, and demonstrates the profound impact of federal legislation, policies, and court decisions. She also examines the political challenge to linguistic diversity by anti-immigration groups and the common myths about bilingual education that have grown out of the media's handling of identity politics.
In the midst of the continuing controversy over the right ways to bring change to American schools, Peter Temes’s book is a firebell in the night. In Against School Reform Mr. Temes sets out a straightforward prescription for our schools which centers on the life of the individual teacher and rejects the billion-dollar school reform industry. He argues that enormous monies and millions of hours of effort have gone into reforming American schools in the past ten years, and we have precious little to show for it. As we enter a critical period in American history—a growing population, an uncompromising demand for well-educated workers, and the complexities of world politics impacting ordinary people every day—there is not more time or money to waste. In Mr. Temes’s view, great teachers are the secret to making better schools. Forget the macro issues of school reform, he advises, and focus on recruiting, retaining, and supporting the very best teachers. Teaching will once again become an elite profession, and school problems will go the way of the trolley car. Against School Reform digs deep into the qualities of great teaching, with stories from real schools and with practical advice for parents, teachers, and students who want to celebrate and support great teachers. It also takes a serious look at what our schools must do to recruit and reward the best teachers in the coming era of teacher shortages. Finally, the book celebrates the power of individual teachers to make a difference in their schools and communities, as forces for bottom-up change. More tests won’t fix our schools, Mr. Temes writes. Bigger, better ideas about education won't fix things either. But great teachers can fix our schools, one classroom at a time.
The best-known model for large-scale private giving to foster educ. reform is Walter Annenberg's $500 million gift to U.S. public educ. in Dec. 1993, mainly to fund challenge grants in the nation's 9 largest cities. These programs ended with the school year, 1999-2000. Believing that the experiences of those cities could provide valuable lessons for future attempts at school reform driven by private giving, this report studies 3 cities experiences with the Challenge: NY City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. It concludes that Annenberg didn't accomplish what he had hoped -- the system was largely unresponsive.
