What is a charter school? Where do they come from? Who promotes them, and why? What are they supposed to do? Are they the silver bullet to the ills plaguing the American public education system? This book provides a comprehensive and accessible overview and analysis of charter schools and their many dimensions. It shows that charter schools as a whole lower the quality of education through the privatization and marketization of education. The final chapter provides readers with a way toward rethinking and remaking education in a way that is consistent with modern requirements. Society and its members need a fully funded high quality public education system open to all and controlled by a public authority.
Misplaced Blame: Decades of Failing Schools, Their Children and Their Teachers examines the underlying causes of why schools fail. The book describes the challenges that teachers and their pupils encounter in an environment that is dictated by poverty and harsh, unfunded mandates. The volume illustrates that school failure reflects a lack of opportunities—nothing more. The book also discusses the changing role of teachers over the years and teacher-led efforts to improve their students’ circumstances.
For decades, Marietta High was the flagship public school of a largely white suburban community in Cobb County, Georgia, just northwest of Atlanta. Today, as the school’s majority black and Latino students struggle with high rates of poverty and low rates of graduation, Marietta High has become a symbol of the wave of resegregation that is sweeping white students and students of color into separate schools across the American South. Students of the Dream begins with the first generations of Marietta High desegregators authorized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling and follows the experiences of later generations who saw the dream of integration fall apart. Grounded in over one hundred interviews with current and former Marietta High students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and politicians, this innovative ethnographic history invites readers onto the key battlegrounds—varsity sports, school choice, academic tracking, and social activism—of Marietta’s struggle against resegregation. Well-intentioned calls for diversity and colorblindness, Ruth Carbonette Yow shows, have transformed local understandings of the purpose and value of school integration, and not always for the better. The failure of local, state, or national policies to stem the tide of resegregation is leading activists—students, parents, and teachers—to reject traditional integration models and look for other ways to improve educational outcomes among African American and Latino students. Yow argues for a revitalized commitment to integration, but one that challenges many of the orthodoxies—including colorblindness—inherited from the mid-twentieth-century civil rights struggle.
2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) Finalist A timely indictment of the corporate takeover of education and the privatization—and profitability—of separate and unequal schools, published at a critical time in the dismantling of public education in America "An astounding look at America's segregated school system, weaving together historical dynamics of race, class, and growing inequality into one concise and commanding story. Cutting School puts our schools at the center of the fight for a new commons." —Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything Public schools are among America's greatest achievements in modern history, yet from the earliest days of tax-supported education—today a sector with an estimated budget of over half a billion dollars—there have been intractable tensions tied to race and poverty. Now, in an era characterized by levels of school segregation the country has not seen since the mid-twentieth century, cultural critic and American studies professor Noliwe Rooks provides a trenchant analysis of our separate and unequal schools and argues that profiting from our nation's failure to provide a high-quality education to all children has become a very big business. Cutting School deftly traces the financing of segregated education in America, from reconstruction through Brown v. Board of Education up to the current controversies around school choice, teacher quality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and more, to elucidate the course we are on today: the wholesale privatization of our schools. Rooks's incisive critique breaks down the fraught landscape of "segrenomics," showing how experimental solutions to the so-called achievement gaps—including charters, vouchers, and cyber schools—rely on, profit from, and ultimately exacerbate disturbingly high levels of racial and economic segregation under the guise of providing equal opportunity. Rooks chronicles the making and unmaking of public education and the disastrous impact of funneling public dollars to private for-profit and nonprofit operations. As the infrastructure crumbles, a number of major U.S. cities are poised to permanently dismantle their public school systems—the very foundation of our multicultural democracy. Yet Rooks finds hope and promise in the inspired individuals and powerful movements fighting to save urban schools. A comprehensive, compelling account of what's truly at stake in the relentless push to deregulate and privatize, Cutting School is a cri de coeur for all of us to resist educational apartheid in America.
The Condition of Education 2019, a congressionally mandated annual report summarizing the latest data on education in the United States. This report is designed to help policymakers and the public monitor educational progress. This year's report includes 48 indicators on topics ranging from prekindergarten through postsecondary education, as well as labor force outcomes and international comparisons.
What happens when a Canadian principal, guided by the teachings of Fullan and Hargreaves, takes on the role of school leader in an inner-city charter school in the United States? This inside story of a principal in the DC charter school system, reveals much about the desire for educators and students to experience more than a life of multiple-choice testing that tends to be so commonplace in these schools. While such a case adds to the mound of research that supports the ‘change takes time’ findings, it nevertheless demonstrates the reality, on a day-to-day basis, of what’s worth fighting for in schools. Student and teacher engagement and empowerment matter, and to get to such ends, a school must fiercely focus on targets well beyond test scores.
Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.
The Condition of Education 2018 summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. The report presents 47 indicators on the status and condition of education. The indicators represent a consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national measures of the condition and progress of education for which accurate data are available. The Condition of Education includes an "At a Glance" section, which allows readers to quickly make comparisons across indicators, and a "Highlights" section, which captures key findings from each indicator. In addition, The Condition of Education contains a Reader's Guide, a Glossary, and a Guide to Sources that provide additional background information. Each indicator provides links to the source data tables used to produce the analyses.
