Structured schools, free schools, graded schools, ungraded schools, no schools at all—the conflicts over public education in America rage on, for contemporary schools have not lived up to our expectations. The essence of the criticism reflected in the essays in this volume is that America's dual educational goals—free inquiry and social mobility-are not being met. Instead of producing enlightened citizens capable of high social and economic mobility, our schools have become warehouses of children stored as commodities, docile and immobile.
Winner of the 1998 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Titles This book challenges common assumptions about the efficacy of teacher collaboration, empowerment, and professional development to improve the educational experiences of low-achieving African American students without engaging the political and ideological contexts in which reforms take place. Written in a clear, engaging style, the book tells the story of two restructuring junior high schools in a single district, and how teachers' ideologies and race, class, and power contradictions in the schools, school district, and city shaped outcomes. Although the book is a critique of restructuring, powerful portraits of teachers who create culturally responsive and empowering educational experiences demonstrate the potential to reform educational practices and policies for African American students and suggest a direction for transforming schools.
Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.
In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.
Restructuring in the Classroom goes into the classrooms of three elementary schools to take a detailed look at how teachers responded to changes in structure in their schools. The authors interviewed principals, teachers, parents, support staff, and district personnel to produce in-depth case studies of schools at various stages of restructuring, showing what the school had done to change its structure and how those changes had occurred. Selecting four teachers in each school for closer observation and discussion, the authors reveal how those teachers responded to the changes around them in their day-to-day practice in the classroom. They show, for example, how teaching practice is or is not affected by changes in the way students are grouped for learning, in the way teachers relate to groups of students and to each other, and in the way time is allocated to subject matter.
Education reform has become part of a political imperative in a number of developed countries, including the USA, Japan and the UK. This book questions why this reconstruction occurred at the same time in different places and asks, what common themes are emerging in the restructuring movement?
The editors of this volume aim to help educators make better decisions about their efforts at restructuring by showing what has and has not worked in some of the most widely known experiments. Because the programmes examined have been in place for several years, the cases offer richness of detail and a wealth of ideas. This book's insights and practical detail will benefit educators both in schools and at district level, as well as students and academics in the field.
The restructuring of schools systems across the world has been controversial. Have reforms been driven by a desire to cut educational budgets or the need to improve the quality of educational provision? This book explores the restructuring movement, with a particular emphasis on how decentralisation of power has affected the quality of education. It provides a broad and international picture of educational reform.
Discusses how school choice, misapplied standards of accountability, the No Child Left Behind mandate, and the use of a corporate model have all led to a decline in public education and presents arguments for a return to strong neighborhood schools and quality teaching.
This volume offers an overview of educational restructuring, its aims and possibilities in the European and North American context. A conceptual analysis of educational policy systems and development in both continents is provided and empirical cases are presented within this framework. Overviews are given of the national stage in Canada. from several countries.
