In The Future of Our Schools, Lois Weiner explains why teachers who care passionately about teaching and social justice need to unite the energy for teaching to efforts to self-govern and transform teacher unions. Drawing on research, her experience as a public school teacher, and as a union activist, she explains how to create the teachers unions public education desperately needs. Lois Weiner is a professor at New Jersey City University and has been a life-long teacher union activist who has served as an officer of three different union locals. She is the author of The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and their Unions: Stories for Resistanc e .
How local educational justice movements wrestle with neoliberal school reform Parents, educators, and activists are passionately fighting to improve public schools around the country. In This Is Our School! Hava Rachel Gordon takes us inside these fascinating school reform movements, exploring their origins, aims, and victories as they work to build a better future for our education system. Focusing on a school district in Denver, Colorado, Gordon takes a look at different coalitions within the school reform movement, as well as the surprising competition that arises between them. Drawing on over eighty interviews and ethnographic research, she explores how these groups vie for power, as well as the role that race, class, and gentrification play in shaping their successes and failures, strategies and structures. Gordon shows us what happens when people mobilize from the ground up and advocate for educational change. This Is Our School! gives us an inside look at the diverse voices within the school reform movement, each of which plays an important role in the fight to improve public education.
"The greatest influence on school district improvement is the extent to which school leaders and teachers collectively transform climate, develop culture and build capacity for the purpose of creating coherence. Districts on the Move (DOTM) paved the way for system change by establishing coherent cultures of learning. Now that DOTM has been written and district leaders can establish the context for positive system change, this new book, Schools on the Move (SOTM), will delve into bringing that vision to life and realizing school improvement at the building level. At the heart of this matter is a foundational principle that schools are the unit of change for systemic improvement. It is imperative to reduce the variances in climate, culture, capacity and coherence that exist among and within school sites if school districts are to create a coherent system of continuous improvement. This book will provide practical tools and guidance to help schools create coherent systems (and thereby improve the whole district) in these four domains: 1. Shared Leadership: partnering with teachers and staff to develop a culture of co-learning 2. Clarity of Focus: creating a strategic focus on equitable student growth 3. Collective Expertise: developing instructional coherence through cycles of collaborative inquiry 4. Continuous Improvement: maintaining a focus on evidence and impact Collaborative inquiry is the vehicle through which this change is realized. Collaborative inquiry "shapes a common mindset" (Donohoo) and allows educators to develop collective efficacy through mastery of shared learning experiences"--
Forming healthy, solid relationships with their typical peers is a major challenge for most children with autism spectrum disorders. This comprehensive social skills curriculum has the dual purpose of helping educators develop appropriate social skills in children with pervasive developmental disorders while also fostering understanding and tolerance among typical peers and school staff. The curriculum includes built-in booster lessons, so the child receives multiple presentations of the material, thus reinforcing the lesson for better understanding and generalization.
From grade school to graduate school, from the poorest public institutions to the most affluent private ones, our educational system is failing students. In his provocative new book, cognitive scientist and bestselling author Roger Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking. The time is now for schools to start teaching minds!
Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.
An educational innovator who worked at Sesame Workshop and The George Lucas Educational Foundation offers a new vision for learning As a result of constant innovation, learning is no longer limited by traditional confines and we're moving beyond students tied to their chairs, desks, and textbooks-and teachers locked away in classrooms. In Education Nation author Milton Chen draws from extensive experience in media-from his work on Sesame Street in its nascent years to his role as executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation-to support a vision for a new world of learning. This book, in six chapters, explores the "edges" in education—the places where K-12 learning has already seen revolutionary changes through innovative reform and the use of technology. Examines ways in which learning can be revolutionized through innovative reform and the use of technology Explores the ever-expanding world of technology for breakthroughs in teaching and learning Includes many wonderful resources to support innovation in schools across the nation This important book offers a clear vision for tomorrow's classrooms that will enhance learning opportunities for all children.
Shares the voices of students speaking out against the failures of urban education "Our schools suck." This is how many young people of color call attention to the kind of public education they are receiving. In cities across the nation, many students are trapped in under-funded, mismanaged and unsafe schools. Yet, a number of scholars and of public figures have shifted attention away from the persistence of school segregation to lambaste the values of young people themselves. Our Schools Suck forcefully challenges this assertion by giving voice to the compelling stories of African American and Latino students who attend under-resourced inner-city schools, where guidance counselors and AP classes are limited and security guards and metal detectors are plentiful—and grow disheartened by a public conversation that continually casts them as the problem with urban schools. By showing that young people are deeply committed to education but often critical of the kind of education they are receiving, this book highlights the dishonesty of public claims that they do not value education. Ultimately, these powerful student voices remind us of the ways we have shirked our public responsibility to create excellent schools. True school reform requires no less than a new civil rights movement, where adults join with young people to ensure an equal education for each and every student.
Research shows school improvement initiatives are most effective when they come from the district level, rather than the state. While there is no one solution to school improvement that holds true in every classroom every time, there are two clearly identified aspects that improve the odds of school success: implementing a curriculum focused on developing knowledge, and supporting a culture where every teacher improves.In Creating the Schools Our Children Need, Dr. Dylan Wiliam outlines a framework for evaluating new district initiatives, and guides school boards, administrators, and district leaders through a breakdown of why what we¿re doing right now isn¿t working, and what we need to be doing instead.
