Standards-based education (SBE) has been the dominant educational reform movement since the early 1980s, reinforced by federal and state accountability systems. This book examines the efforts of educational leaders in implementing SBE to improve student achievement in a variety of demographic contexts but with common challenges. Four stages of SBE implementation are identified that focus on strong district leadership of the articulation of how SBE can benefit students, an investment in collaborative structures and teacher training, and the facilitation of dialogue among all educational stakeholders. The descriptions of leadership actions and educator development at each stage can serve as a guide for educators and policy makers to assess which stage schools and districts are in and what steps can be taken to effectively move SBE reform efforts forward. The reflective questions for district, school, and teacher leaders at each stage can facilitate the dialogues that can ensure that SBE reform supports changes in classroom instruction that improve the learning opportunities and educational outcomes of all students.
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.
Biology is where many of science's most exciting and relevant advances are taking place. Yet, many students leave school without having learned basic biology principles, and few are excited enough to continue in the sciences. Why is biology education failing? How can reform be accomplished? This book presents information and expert views from curriculum developers, teachers, and others, offering suggestions about major issues in biology education: what should we teach in biology and how should it be taught? How can we measure results? How should teachers be educated and certified? What obstacles are blocking reform?
The District of Columbia (DC) has struggled for decades to improve its public education system. In 2007 the DC government made a bold change in the way it governs public education with the goal of shaking up the system and bringing new energy to efforts to improve outcomes for students. The Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA) shifted control of the city's public schools from an elected school board to the mayor, developed a new state department of education, created the position of chancellor, and made other significant management changes. A Plan for Evaluating the District of Columbia's Public Schools offers a framework for evaluating the effects of PERAA on DC's public schools. The book recommends an evaluation program that includes a systematic yearly public reporting of key data as well as in-depth studies of high-priority issues including: quality of teachers, principals, and other personnel; quality of classroom teaching and learning; capacity to serve vulnerable children and youth; promotion of family and community engagement; and quality and equity of operations, management, and facilities. As part of the evaluation program, the Mayor's Office should produce an annual report to the city on the status of the public schools, including an analysis of trends and all the underlying data. A Plan for Evaluating the District of Columbia's Public Schools suggests that D.C. engage local universities, philanthropic organizations, and other institutions to develop and sustain an infrastructure for ongoing research and evaluation of its public schools. Any effective evaluation program must be independent of school and city leaders and responsive to the needs of all stakeholders. Additionally, its research should meet the highest standards for technical quality.
In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.
While there is no doubt that an abundance of newly enacted education policies abounds across the state and across the nation, more fundamental questions remain. What is the nature of these reforms? What do they hope to accomplish? How successful have they been? In this book, we attempt to provide some answers to these questions by examining a major set of education policy reforms undertaken in Michigan and across the country over the past 20 or more years. These innovations include finance reform, state assessment of student performance, a series of school accountability measures, charter schools, schools of choice, and, for Detroit, a bevy of oft-conflicting policies and reform efforts that have belabored but seldom helped its public schools. In the pages that follow, we examine the decidedly mixed outcomes and effects of this large array of reform policies and programs. Each chapter addresses a specific policy area, outlining reform activity across the nation with an emphasis on Michigan's efforts as well as on one or two states that led these changes.
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.
It is now time to break down the ideology of exceptionalism in the United States and other Anglo-American nations if we are to develop reforms that will truly inspire our teachers to improve learning for all our studentsespecially those who struggle the most. In that essential quest, Pasi Sahlberg is undoubtedly one of the very best teachers of all. From the Foreword by Andy Hargreaves, Lynch School of Education, Boston College Finnish Lessons is a first-hand, comprehensive account of how Finland built a world-class education system during the past three decades. The author traces the evolution of education policies in Finland and highlights how they differ from the United States and other industrialized countries. He shows how rather than relying on competition, choice, and external testing of students, education reforms in Finland focus on professionalizing teachers work, developing instructional leadership in schools, and enhancing trust in teachers and schools. This book details the complexity of educational change and encourages educators and policymakers to develop effective solutions for their own districts and schools.
In Confessions of a School Reformer, eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. Cuban begins his own story in the 1930s, when he entered first grade at a Pittsburgh public school, the youngest son of Russian immigrants who placed great stock in the promises of education. With a keen historian's eye, Cuban expands his personal narrative to analyze the overlapping social, political, and economic movements that have attempted to influence public schooling in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. He documents how education both has and has not been altered by the efforts of the Progressive Era of the first half of the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s through the 1970s, and the standards-based school reform movement of the 1980s through today. Cuban points out how these dissimilar movements nevertheless shared a belief that school change could promote student success and also forge a path toward a stronger economy and a more equitable society. He relates the triumphs of these school reform efforts as well as more modest successes and unintended outcomes. Interwoven with Cuban's evaluations and remembrances are his "confessions," in which he accounts for the beliefs he held and later rejected, as well as mistakes and areas of weakness that he has found in his own ideology. Ultimately, Cuban remarks with a tempered optimism on what schools can and cannot do in American democracy.
