Keeping School
Keeping School

Author: Deborah Meier

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2005-08-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780807032657

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Education reformers Deborah Meier, Theodore R. Sizer, and Nancy Faust Sizer have published books that have helped shape a movement. As school principals, all three have done another kind of writing as well: short essays in their own schools' newsletters to families. Keeping School collects the best of these wonderfully readable gems of education writing-from an urban public elementary school and an exurban charter high school-along with new essays. Together, the letters form a portrait of what schools can look like when they are based on the authors' understandings of learning, community, authority, and standards.

Deer Hunting with Jesus
Deer Hunting with Jesus

Author: Joe Bageant

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2008-06-24

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0307449572

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Years before Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash, a raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor -- and why they have learned to hate liberalism. What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks." Deer Hunting with Jesus is Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Like countless American small towns, it is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas or health care. Alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape. He writes of: • His childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced • The mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt • The ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’ t get it • Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England

Sustainable Small Schools
Sustainable Small Schools

Author: Craig B. Howley

Publisher: Eric Clearinghouse on Rural

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9781880785164

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This book aims to help parents, community members, and educators find resources, design school options, and take action together to improve small rural schools in ways that meet community and student needs. Chapter 1 discusses the virtues of smallness, outlines basic assumptions about the role and nature of good education, examines the school-community relationship and the need to reestablish parent and community involvement, and underscores the ability of citizens to be educational change agents. Chapter 2 discusses the aims and history of mass schooling in industrial society; social and political forces driving school consolidation; ways to address the "hard" issues of consolidation (course offerings, costs, achievement); and aspects of state policy making. This chapter also lists 29 key studies and literature reviews about school size. Chapter 3 provides examples of strategies to make the rural community the focus of curricula, including community study, the Foxfire approach, and school involvement in local economic development. Chapter 4 describes innovative tactics for organizing rural schools, including the 4-day week, mixed-age (or multigrade) classrooms, and use of electronic technology. Chapter 5 provides strategic and tactical tips for making change happen. Chapter 6 is an annotated bibliography and resource list in eight sections: partnerships between schools and families or communities, coalition building, needs assessment, research on consolidation and school size, innovations featured in the book, rural resources from regional educational laboratories, and tools for finding information. Includes an index. (SV)

Rethinking Gifted Education
Rethinking Gifted Education

Author: James H. Borland

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0807743046

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Gifted education is in a period of transition unlike any it has experienced in this generation. Thinkers within the field and without are questioning the practice of gifted education, the theoretical foundations on which this practice rests, and even the value and legitimacy of the concept of giftedness. This fresh and provocative volume contains essays by leading thinkers on gifted education and by writers outside the field who have examined it critically. Each author examines, reconsiders, and challenges the assumptions and beliefs underlying the theory and practice of gifted education, providing a "roadmap" to guide both current considerations of and future planning for gifted education programs.

The Foxfire Approach
The Foxfire Approach

Author: Hilton Smith

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-08

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 9463005641

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"This collection of essays by Foxfire practitioners represents the wide range of adaptations by educators of the pedagogical orientation of the Foxfire Magazine and Foxfire Programs for Teachers. Former students in the magazine class at Rabun County High School share the continuing impact of that experience on their lives, including a former student who is pioneering the magazine project with her sixth grade class. An early childhood teacher make a passionate, articulate case for instruction guided by the Foxfire Core Practices. And a former school administrator shares his experiences as guidance to current school administrators in enabling then supporting teachers to implement instruction guided by Foxfire’s Core Practices. Participants in Foxfire’s Program for Teachers, from early childhood teachers to college professors, describe their adaptations of the Foxfire Approach for instruction at all grade levels, all subjects and all demographics – including how they coped with the challenges they faced. One practitioner describes how she used the Core Practices to design instruction in rural China. We have an engaging essay focused on our summer courses for teachers, based on extensive observations and interview of participants attending those courses. Several essays explore the pedagogical roots of the Foxfire Approach, as well as its value in providing instruction today which engages the students in the content and results in durable learning. Readers can read straight through the book, beginning with a short historical introductory essay, or skip around to topics of interest to assemble an informed assessment of the potential of the Foxfire Approach."

Rural Education for the Twenty-first Century
Rural Education for the Twenty-first Century

Author: Kai A. Schafft

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0271036826

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"A collection of essays examining the various social, cultural, and economic intersections of rural place and global space, as viewed through the lens of education. Explores practices that offer both problems and possibilities for the future of rural schools and communities, in the United States and abroad"--Provided by publisher.