First Things First!
First Things First!

Author: Ruby Takanishi

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0807774081

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Challenging policymakers, educators, reformers, and citizens to replace piecemeal reforms with fundamental redesign, First Things First! calls for a different way of organizing the American primary school. Ruby Takanishi outlines a new framework for integrating early education with primary education (pre-K–5), including both short- and long-term strategies, that starts with 3- and 4-year-olds. Featuring portraits of primary schools that have successfully integrated pre–K, the book includes resources on dual-language learners, dual-generation family engagement, effective philanthropy, rethinking advocacy, and more. The book centers on four basic questions: Why should the United States design a new primary school as children’s first, widely shared educational experience? How can the educators of the new primary school use new knowledge about how children learn to improve their practice? What will it take to create a new primary school that educates all children well? How can the design of the new primary school reflect demographic, social, linguistic, and cultural changes and adapt to the requirements of a global economy? First Things First! reframes the basic structure of traditional primary education, challenging us to get the early years of a 21st-century public education system off to a new and stronger start. “The vision of a new primary school model in this book should be studied by all workers in the fields of education, human development, and social policy. The scholarship in this book is impeccable and the arguments advanced by this leading scholar are most convincing. Further, the book is beautifully written.” —Edward Zigler, Sterling Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Yale University “Takanishi makes a compelling case that enabling all American children to achieve their potential requires both expansion of high-quality preschool and fundamental changes in how our public elementary schools serve young students.” —Sara Mead, Bellwether Education Partners “Dr. Takanishi has laid out a vision and approach to schooling that is comprehensive, forward-looking, and versed in strong evidence. This is must-reading for educators, leaders, policymakers, and researchers.” —Arthur Reynolds, University of Minnesota

The New American High School
The New American High School

Author: Ted Sizer

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-05-22

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 111858497X

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The late Theodore Sizer's vision for a truly democratic public high school system Our current high schools are ill-designed and inefficient. We have inherited a program of studies that in its overall structure has not changed in over a century. The question is What's next? Theodore Sizer, the founder of The Coalition of Essential Schools, was a passionate advocate for the American school system. In this, his last book, he offers a vision of what a future secondary education might look like. In a book that tells the story of his own odyssey, Sizer gives shape to a much-needed agenda for improving our high schools. Includes a vision for the future of our High Schools from one of America's greatest leaders of educational reform Written by Theodore Sizer founder of The Coalition of Essential Schools and author of landmark book Horace's Compromise This final book from the late Theodore Sizer reveals the man and his vision for our secondary education system.

Tested
Tested

Author: Linda Perlstein

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Published: 2007-07-24

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1429923245

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The pressure is on at schools across America. In recent years, reforms such as No Child Left Behind have created a new vision of education that emphasizes provable results, uniformity, and greater attention for floundering students. Schools are expected to behave more like businesses and judged almost solely on the bottom line: test scores. To see if this world is producing better students, Linda Perlstein immersed herself in a suburban Maryland elementary school. The resulting portrait -- detailed, human, and truly thought-provoking -- is marked by the same narrative gifts and expertise that made Not Much Just Chillin' so illuminating. The school, once deemed a failure, is now held up as an example of reform done right. Perlstein explores the rewards and costs of that transformation, through the experiences of the people who lived it. Nine-year-olds meditate to activate their brains before exams and kindergartners write paragraphs. Teachers attempt to address diverse needs at the same time they are expected to follow daily scripts, and feel compelled to focus on topics that will be tested at the expense of those that won't. The principal attempts to keep it all together, in the face of immense challenges. Perlstein provides the first detailed view of how new education policies are modified by human realities. Tested will be talked about, thought about, written about -- and will almost certainly play an important role in the national debate as the federal education law come up for renewal.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System
The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Author: Diane Ravitch

Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)

Published: 2010-03-02

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0465014917

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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.

Designing the New American University
Designing the New American University

Author: Michael M. Crow

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2015-03-15

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1421417243

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A radical blueprint for reinventing American higher education. America’s research universities consistently dominate global rankings but may be entrenched in a model that no longer accomplishes their purposes. With their multiple roles of discovery, teaching, and public service, these institutions represent the gold standard in American higher education, but their evolution since the nineteenth century has been only incremental. The need for a new and complementary model that offers broader accessibility to an academic platform underpinned by knowledge production is critical to our well-being and economic competitiveness. Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University and an outspoken advocate for reinventing the public research university, conceived the New American University model when he moved from Columbia University to Arizona State in 2002. Following a comprehensive reconceptualization spanning more than a decade, ASU has emerged as an international academic and research powerhouse that serves as the foundational prototype for the new model. Crow has led the transformation of ASU into an egalitarian institution committed to academic excellence, inclusiveness to a broad demographic, and maximum societal impact. In Designing the New American University, Crow and coauthor William B. Dabars—a historian whose research focus is the American research university—examine the emergence of this set of institutions and the imperative for the new model, the tenets of which may be adapted by colleges and universities, both public and private. Through institutional innovation, say Crow and Dabars, universities are apt to realize unique and differentiated identities, which maximize their potential to generate the ideas, products, and processes that impact quality of life, standard of living, and national economic competitiveness. Designing the New American University will ignite a national discussion about the future evolution of the American research university.

Creating the Suburban School Advantage
Creating the Suburban School Advantage

Author: John L. Rury

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-04-15

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1501748416

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Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post–World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.

The New American School
The New American School

Author: John C. Hill

Publisher: R&L Education

Published: 1995-12-28

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1461732468

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The New American School will emerge from the ashes of the old. An underlying premise of the present book is that such a rebirth will occur in the process of restructuring. Restructuring in education is the designing, staffing, programming, and building of the school around learning, the central function of every educational organization. In the following pages, this definition will be elaborated, and methods will be offered for restructuring schools in order to realize a truly New American School.

Charter School City
Charter School City

Author: Douglas N. Harris

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-07-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 022669478X

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In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

Making a Mass Institution
Making a Mass Institution

Author: Kyle P. Steele

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-07-17

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1978814410

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Making a Mass Institution describes how Indianapolis, Indiana created a divided and unjust system of high schools over the course of the twentieth century, one that effectively sorted students geographically, economically, and racially. Like most U.S. cities, Indianapolis began its secondary system with a singular, decidedly academic high school, but ended the 1960s with multiple high schools with numerous paths to graduation. Some of the schools were academic, others vocational, and others still for what was eventually called “life adjustment.” This system mirrored the multiple forces of mass society that surrounded it, as it became more bureaucratic, more focused on identifying and organizing students based on perceived abilities, and more anxious about teaching conformity to middle-class values. By highlighting the experiences of the students themselves and the formation of a distinct, school-centered youth culture, Kyle P. Steele argues that high school, as it evolved into a mass institution, was never fully the domain of policy elites, school boards and administrators, or students, but a complicated and ever-changing contested meeting place of all three.

Making the Grade
Making the Grade

Author: William A. Fischel

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-11-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0226251314

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A significant factor for many people deciding where to live is the quality of the local school district, with superior schools creating a price premium for housing. The result is a “race to the top,” as all school districts attempt to improve their performance in order to attract homebuyers. Given the importance of school districts to the daily lives of children and families, it is surprising that their evolution has not received much attention. In this provocative book, William Fischel argues that the historical development of school districts reflects Americans’ desire to make their communities attractive to outsiders. The result has been a standardized, interchangeable system of education not overly demanding for either students or teachers, one that involved parents and local voters in its governance and finance. Innovative in its focus on bottom-up processes generated by individual behaviors rather than top-down decisions by bureaucrats, Making the Grade provides a new perspective on education reform that emphasizes how public schools form the basis for the localized social capital in American towns and cities.