Reform as Learning
Reform as Learning

Author: Lea Ann Hubbard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1135925488

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Looking closely at the recent reform efforts in San Diego, this book explores the full range of critical issues pertaining to urban school reform. Drawing on the systemic school reform initiative that was launched in San Diego in the 1990s, this book explores all layers of the school reform process - from leadership in the central office, to work with principals and teachers, to the impact on how teachers worked with students in the classroom. The authors draw on careful ethnographic research collected over the entire four years of the San Diego reforms, in order to identify, not only how teachers, principals and other district educators were shaped by the large-scale reforms, but also the ways in which the reform unfolded. In doing so, the book shows more broadly how actors throughout a school system can change the views of leaders and impact the larger reform process.

Learning Policy
Learning Policy

Author: David K. Cohen

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0300133340

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Education reformers and policymakers argue that improved students’ learning requires stronger academic standards, stiffer state tests, and accountability for students’ scores. Yet these efforts seem not to be succeeding in many states. The authors of this important book argue that effective state reform depends on conditions which most reforms ignore: coherence in practice as well as policy and opportunities for professional learning. The book draws on a decade’s detailed study of California’s ambitious and controversial program to improve mathematics teaching and learning. Researchers David Cohen and Heather Hill report that state policy influenced teaching and learning when there was consistency among the tests and other policy instruments; when there was consistency among the curricula and other instruments of classroom practice; and when teachers had substantial opportunities to learn the practices proposed by the policy. These conditions were met for a minority of elementary school teachers in California. When the conditions were met for teachers, students had higher scores on state math tests. The book also shows that, for most teachers, the reform ended with consistency in state policy. They did not have access to consistent instruments of classroom practice, nor did they have opportunities to learn the new practices which state policymakers proposed. In these cases, neither teachers nor their students benefited from the state reform. This book offers insights into the ways policy and practice can be linked in successful educational reform and shows why such linkage has been difficult to achieve. It offers useful advice for practitioners and policymakers seeking to improve education, and to analysts seeking to understand it.

Extending Educational Reform
Extending Educational Reform

Author: Amanda Datnow

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780415240703

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Can a fundamental reform in the organisation of a school lead to school improvement? This shows how theory can be applied in practice to get around issues that are preventing change and improvement.

Addicted to Reform
Addicted to Reform

Author: John Merrow

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1620972433

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The prize-winning PBS correspondent's provocative antidote to America's misguided approaches to K-12 school reform During an illustrious four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow—winner of the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the McGraw Prize—reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on everything from the rise of district-wide cheating scandals and the corporate greed driving an ADD epidemic to teacher-training controversies and America's obsession with standardized testing. Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary. Now, the revered education correspondent of PBS NewsHour distills his best thinking on education into a twelve-step approach to fixing a K–12 system that Merrow describes as being "addicted to reform" but unwilling to address the real issue: American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters—including "Measure What Matters," and "Embrace Teachers"—that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing. Addicted to Reform is written with the kind of passionate concern that could come only from a lifetime devoted to the people and places that constitute the foundation of our nation. It is a "big book" that forms an astute and urgent blueprint for providing a quality education to every American child.

Teachers Leading Educational Reform
Teachers Leading Educational Reform

Author: Alma Harris

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1317247884

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Teachers Leading Educational Reform explores the ways in which teachers across the world are currently working together in professional learning communities (PLCs) to generate meaningful change and innovation in order to transform pedagogy and practice. By discussing how teachers can work collectively and collaboratively on the issues of learning and teaching that matter to them, it argues that through collective action and collaborative agency, teachers are leading educational reform. By offering contemporary examples and perspectives on the practice, impact and sustainability of PLCs, this book takes a global, comparative view showing categorically that those educational systems that are performing well, and seek to perform well, are using PLCs as the infrastructure to support teacher-led improvement. Split into three sections that look at the macro, meso and micro aspects of how far professional collaboration is building the capacity and capability for school and system improvement, this text asks the questions: Is the PLC work authentic? Is the PLC work being implemented at a superficial or deep level? Is there evidence of a positive impact on students/teachers at the school/district/system level? Is provision in place for sustaining the PLC work? Teachers Leading Educational Reform illustrates how focused and purposeful professional collaboration is contributing to change and reform across the globe. It reinforces why teachers must be at the heart of the school reform processes as the drivers and architects of school transformation and change.

Real Learning, Real Work
Real Learning, Real Work

Author: Adria Steinberg

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780415917933

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First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Learning from the Past
Learning from the Past

Author: Diane Ravitch

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1995-02

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780801849213

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Many Americans view today's problems in education as an unprecedented crisis brought on by contemporary social ills. In Learning from the Past a group of distinguished educational historians and scholars of public policy reminds us that many of our current difficulties – as well as recent reform efforts – have important historical antecedents. What can we learn, they ask, from nineteenth century efforts to promote early childhood education, or debates in the 1920s about universal secondary education, or the curriculum reforms of the 1950s? Reflecting a variety of intellectual and disciplinary orientations, the contributors to this volume examine major changes in educational development and reform and consider how such changes have been implemented in the past. They address questions of governance, equity and multiculturalism, curriculum standards, school choice, and a variety of other issues. Policy makers and other school reformers, they conclude, would do well to investigate the past in order to appreciate the implications of the present reform initiatives.

Implementing Deeper Learning and 21st Century Education Reforms
Implementing Deeper Learning and 21st Century Education Reforms

Author: Fernando M. Reimers

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-04

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 3030570398

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This open access book is a comparative analysis of recent large scale education reforms that broadened curriculum goals to better prepare students for the 21st century. The book examines what governments actually do when they broaden curriculum goals, with attention to the details of implementation. To this end, the book examines system level reforms in six countries at various levels of development. The study includes system level reforms in jurisdictions where students achieve high levels in international assessments of basic literacies, such as Singapore and Ontario, Canada, as well as in nations where students achieve much lower levels, such as Kenya, Mexico, Punjab-Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The chapters examine system-level reforms that focus on strengthening the capacity to teach the basics, as in Ontario and Pakistan, as well as reforms that aim at building the capacity to teach a much broader set of competencies and skills, such as Kenya, Mexico, Singapore and Zimbabwe. The volume includes systems at very different levels of spending per student and reforms at various points in the cycle of policy implementation, some just starting, some struggling to survive a governmental transition, and others that have been in place for an extended period of time. From the comparative study of these reforms, we aim to provide an understanding of how to build the capacity of education systems to teach 21st century skills at scale in diverse settings.

Assessment Reform in Education
Assessment Reform in Education

Author: Rita Berry

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-04-07

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9400707290

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This book discusses the recent assessment movements in the eastern and western worlds with particular focuses on the policies, implementation, and impacts of assessment reform on education. A new perspective of assessment sees assessment as a means to enhance learning. This book examines the tensions, challenges and outcomes (intended and unintended) of assessment reform arising at the interface of policy and implementation, and implementation and student learning. The book reviews the experiences insights gained from research, and identifies the facilitators and hindrances to effective change. It reflects current thinking of assessment and provides the readers with ample background information of assessment development in many countries including USA, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Global Education Reform
Global Education Reform

Author: Frank Adamson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-02

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1317396952

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With contributions from Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, Pasi Sahlberg, and Martin Carnoy, Global Education Reform is an eye-opening analysis of national educational reforms and the types of high-achieving systems needed to serve all students equitably. The collection documents the ideologically and educationally distinctive approaches countries around the world have taken to structuring their education systems. Focusing on three pairs of case studies written by internationally acclaimed experts, the book provides a powerful analysis of the different ends of an ideological spectrum----from strong state investments in public education to market-based approaches. An introductory chapter offers an overview of the theories guiding both neoliberal reforms such as those implemented in Chile, Sweden and the United States with efforts to build strong and equitable public education systems as exemplified by Cuba, Finland and Canada. The pairs of case studies that follow examine the historical evolution of education within an individual country and compare and contrast national educational outcomes. A concluding chapter dissects the educational outcomes of the differing economic and governance approaches, as well as the policy implications.