"An extraordinaryily well-documented and interesting account of the problems of ethnic change in a big city school system." - Martin Renn, Professor of Social Policy, MIT and author of the Dilemmas of Reforms and Social Policy"Even small town systems nowadays face the crisis of confidence in public education. Thus the lessons learned in hammering out production relationships between school and community in New York City, lessons which are admirably laid out in this new and important book, become relevant to everyone concerned about the future of public education." —David Seeley, Executive Director, Public Education Association, 1969-1980, and author of Education Through Partnership
David Rogers uses competing sociological models of "mass society" to analyze the New York City school system, which he describes as a "sick bureaucracy." In his new prologue, the author discusses the divisive school decentralization crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s as well as efforts by subsequent mayors to reform the system, including recent changes implemented by the Bloomberg administration. Originally published by Random House in 1968. From the reviews . . . " A] thorough and important study of the immovable bureaucratic system which is threatening to destroy New York's children." Christian Science Monitor "Rogers captures the true impotence of those who try to open a system which protects itself by drifting from crisis to crisis." New York Magazine " A] book without heroes. . . . Even the best and most civic-minded actors in this tragedy are quickly absorbed by the school machine." New York Times Book Review " R]apidly becoming a classic." Washington Post
When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg centralized control of the citys schools in 2002, he terminated the citys 32-year experiment with decentralized school control dubbed by the mayor and the media as the Bad Old Days. Decentralization grew out of the community control movement of the 1960s, which was itself a response to the bad old days of central control of a school system that was increasingly segregated and unequal. In this probing historical account, Heather Lewis draws on new archival sources and oral histories to argue that the community control movement did influence school improvement, in particular African American and Puerto Rican communities in the 1970s and 80s. Lewis shows how educators with unique insights into the relationships between the schools and the communities they served enabled meaningful change, with a focus on instructional improvement and equity that would be familiar to many observers of contemporary education reform. With a resurgence of local organizing and potential challenges to mayoral control, this informative history will be important reading for todays educational and community leaders.
With critical issues like desegregation and funding facing our schools, dissatisfaction with public education has reached a new high. Teachers decry inadequate resources while critics claim educators are more concerned with job security than effective teaching. Though urban education has reached crisis proportions, contending players have difficulty agreeing on a common program of action. This book tells why. Changing Urban Education confronts the prevailing naivete in school reform by examining the factors that shape, reinforce, or undermine reform efforts. Edited by one of the nation's leading urban scholars, it examines forces for change and resistance in urban education and proposes that the barrier to reform can only be overcome by understanding how schools fit into the broader political contexts of their cities. Much of the problem with our schools lies with the reluctance of educators to recognize the profoundly political character of public education. The contributors show how urban political contexts vary widely with factors like racial composition, the role of the teachers' union, and relations between cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. Presenting case studies of original field research in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and six other urban areas, they consider how resistance to desegregation and the concentration of the poor in central urban areas affect education, and they suggest how cities can build support for reform through the involvement of business and other community players. By demonstrating the complex interrelationship between urban education and politics, this book shows schools to be not just places for educating children, but also major employers and large spenders of tax dollars. It also introduces the concept of civic capacity—the ability of educators and non-educators to work together on common goals—and suggests that this key issue must be addressed before education can be improved. Changing Urban Education makes it clear to educators that the outcome of reform efforts depends heavily on their political context as it reminds political scientists that education is a major part of the urban mix. While its prognosis is not entirely optimistic, it sets forth important guidelines that cannot be ignored if our schools are to successfully prepare children for the future.
In many respects, New York City is an unnatural wonder, quite unlike any other American city and also unlike megacities in other industrial countries. Its government and politics, its physical attributes-like the celebrated skyline and high population density-and many of its social characteristics-like the extraordinarily high percentage of the city's population that is foreign-born-are different. But New York City at the same time shares with other American cities an array of political and governmental institutions, practices, traditions, and pressures, ranging from the long dominance and then long decline in the role of party organizations in local government to the city's ultimate dependence on outside actors and forces to shape its political destiny.
Urban Education in the United States examines the development of schools in the large cities of the USA. John Rury, a well-known historian of education, introduces and highlights the most significant and classic essays dealing with urban schooling in this collection. Urban Education in the United States will provide an introduction to critical themes in the history of city schools and will frame each section with an overview of urban education research during particular periods in US history.
"Amid widespread concern that schools are failing to prepare students for workforce participation, higher education, and the economic and technological challenges of the twenty-first century, public school reform efforts across the nation have focused increasingly on standards, performance, and accountability. A particularly critical question involves improving educational opportunities for children in poverty and for other ""at-risk"" students who represent an increasing proportion of public school enrollment.Education Policy for the 21st Century examines a range of key issues in standards-based education reform. Contributors focus on educational trends and issues in metropolitan Chicago, state education policy in Illinois, lessons of Chicago school reform, and standards-based, systemic reform in other states. The volume also includes chapters on standards and assessment in school accountability systems, effects of school spending on student achievement, and ""building-level"" obstacles to urban school reform.Presenting valuable data and a variety of perspectives, this book illuminates both the challenges and opportunities presented by standards-based education reform."
Currently, families are being subjected to increasing public attention. Interest is focussing on their potential strengths and weaknesses in determining how well children do at school. Alongside such human-development oriented expectations, families are also becoming a focus of attention as a resource for human capital in times of economic crises and criticism of the welfare state. In many European countries, parents and children are at the forefront of the welfare state and socio-educational activities in current programs and policies. The current transformation processes in the welfare state are making the relationship between families and the state more dynamic in general, and they are structuring the discourses on the childrearing, education, and child care services in the fields of both public and private responsibility. The introduction of all-day schooling in Germany also has to be viewed in this context. This is gradually changing the traditional half-day structure of German schools and shifting the borders of public and private responsibility on the levels of education, child care, and childrearing institutions. The attention given to parental childrearing and educational responsibility within the context of current national and international debates clearly underlines the fact that issues in private life are increasingly entering the public discourse and becoming subject to attempts at socio-political control. This raises the assumption of an increasing politicization of parenthood in the (post) welfare state that is focusing more and more attention on the structural conditions of gainful employment and child care as well as on the current relations between the genders. This context particularly emphasizes the time and care regimes that decisively determine the practices in daily family life and the utilization of all-day education settings.
This is an annotated bibliography of 20th century books through 1983, and is a reworking of American Studies: An Annotated Bibliography of Works on the Civilization of the United States, published in 1982. Seeking to provide foreign nationals with a comprehensive and authoritative list of sources of information concerning America, it focuses on books that have an important cultural framework, and does not include those which are primarily theoretical or methodological. It is organized in 11 sections: anthropology and folklore; art and architecture; history; literature; music; political science; popular culture; psychology; religion; science/technology/medicine; and sociology. Each section contains a preface introducing the reader to basic bibliographic resources in that discipline and paragraph-length, non-evaluative annotations. Includes author, title, and subject indexes. ISBN 0-521-32555-2 (set) : $150.00.
