The authors provide information on the implementation and outcomes of the four-day school week using quantitative and qualitative data from a variety of sources, including surveys of parents and students in 36 districts in three states.
Across the country, an educational revolution is taking root. Kids are learning more. Teachers are free to teach beyond the test. And parents aren’t worried about what their kids are up to after school. What accounts for this change? The simple answer is, “More time to learn.” The current school day—6 hours and 180 days per year—is obsolete. It fails to provide students with the academic foundations and well-rounded education they need to succeed and thrive in the twenty-first century. The old school day is also out of step with the reality of working families without a stay-at-home parent to manage their children’s after-school time. Using an additional one to two hours, the new school day reworks the schedule so that children can master core academic subjects, receive individualized instruction and tutoring, and be exposed to a broad array of topics such as the arts, music, drama, and sports.
Students typically lose knowledge and skills during the summer, particularly low-income students. Districts and private providers can benefit from the evidence on summer programming to maximize program effectiveness, quality, reach, and funding.
Editor J. Bradley Cousins and colleagues meet the needs of evaluators seeking to implement collaborative and participatory approaches to evaluation in Collaborative Approaches to Evaluation: Principles in Use. Using a multi-phase empirical process to develop and validate a set of principles to guide collaborative approaches to evaluation, the book outlines the principles that the team developed, and then provides case studies of how these principles have been applied in practice. The case studies draw on programs globally in education, health, and community development. The book is an invaluable supplementary text for program evaluation courses where students’ projects are focused on more collaborative and participatory approaches, and it is an essential resource for practicing evaluators and those who commission program evaluations.
Illuminates the condition of education in urban schools compared to schools in other locations. Also explores differences between students from urban schools and students in other locations on a broad spectrum of student and school characteristics. Contents: education outcomes (student achievement, educational attainment, economic outcomes); student background characteristics and afterschool activities; school experiences (school resources and staff, school programs and coursetaking, student behavior). Bibliography. Over 100 charts and tables.
Expanding the learning day is gaining national momentum as an important school-improvement and whole-child development strategy. This issue focuses on school-community partnerships that provide a seamless, longer learning day that best meets the academic (Expanded Learning Time or ELT) and developmental (Expanded Learning Opportunities or ELO) needs of high-poverty students in resource-poor communities. First it draws attention to the importance of ELOs and offers contours of the ELT-ELO partnerships through research evidence and policy analysis. It then covers both in practice and features a spectrum of ELT-ELO partnerships, from less to more integrated models. The issue pays close attention to: The central role ELOs play in ELT schools The changing safeguards for community-based organizations Ways in which current education policy is shaping the approach of schools and community partners to learning and development. This is the 131st volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.
Contemporary public policy assumes that the achievement gap between black and white students could be closed if only schools would do a better job. According to Richard Rothstein, "Closing the gaps between lower-class and middle-class children requires social and economic reform as well as school improvement. Unfortunately, the trend is to shift most of the burden to schools, as if they alone can eradicate poverty and inequality." In this book, Rothstein points the way toward social and economic reforms that would give all children a more equal chance to succeed in school. This book features: a summary of numerous studies linking school achievement to health care quality, nutrition, childrearing styles, housing stability, parental economic security, and more ; aA look at erroneous and misleading data that underlie commonplace claims that some schools "beat the demographic odds and therefore any school can close the achievement gap if only it adopted proper practices." ; and an analysis of how the over-emphasis of standardized tests in federal law obscures the true achievement gap and makes narrowing it more difficult.