Reinterpreting Urban School Reform
Reinterpreting Urban School Reform

Author: Louis F. Miron

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0791486923

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Have urban schools failed, or has reform failed urban schools? This book examines existing urban school programs, ranging from desegregation to reading improvement, in light of available historical, empirical, and case study evidence. Miron and St. John and their contributors probe the underlying theoretical, normative, and political assumptions embedded in specific reform initiatives. They explore how reforms might be reconstructed to better address the underlying challenges and they demonstrate that reforms can be constructively critiqued throughout the stages of implementation, arguing that greater attention should be paid to ethnic and cultural traditions within urban educational settings. Contributors include Leetta Allen-Haynes; Joseph Cadray; Choong-Geun Chung; Richard Fossey; Barry M. Franklin; David Gordon; Carol Anne Hossler; Siri Loescher; Kim Manoil; Genevieve Manset; Louis F. Mirón; Glenda Droogsma Musoba; Kathryn Nakagawa; Carolyn S. Ridenour; Ada B. Simmons; Edward P. St. John; Neil Theobald; Sandra Washburn; Kenneth K. Wong; and Kim Worthington.

Student Voice in School Reform
Student Voice in School Reform

Author: Dana L. Mitra

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0791478947

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High schools continue to be places that isolate, alienate, and disengage students. But what would happen if students were viewed as part of the solution in schools rather than part of the problem? This book examines the emergence of "student voice" at one high school in the San Francisco Bay area where educators went straight to the source and asked the students to help. Struggling, like many high schools, with how to improve student outcomes, educators at Whitman High School decided to invite students to participate in the reform process. Dana L. Mitra describes the evolution of student voice at Whitman, showing that the students enthusiastically created partnerships with teachers and administrators, engaged in meaningful discussion about why so many failed or dropped out, and partnered with teachers and principals to improve learning for themselves and their peers. In documenting the difference that student voice made, this book helps expand ideas of distributed leadership, professional learning communities, and collaboration. The book also contributes much needed research on what student voice initiatives look like in practice and provides powerful evidence of ways in which young people can increase their sense of agency and their sense of belonging in school.

Curriculum, Community, and Urban School Reform
Curriculum, Community, and Urban School Reform

Author: B. Franklin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0230105742

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This book asserts that efforts to reform schools, particularly urban schools, are events that engender a host of issues and conflicts that have been interpreted through the conceptual lens of community.

Parent-School Collaboration
Parent-School Collaboration

Author: Mary E. Henry

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1996-02-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780791428566

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Examines in close detail public schools' relationships with their parents and communities.

The Business of Reforming American Schools
The Business of Reforming American Schools

Author: Denise Gelberg

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780791435052

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Focusing on the influence of the business community on schools, this book describes how popular business management theories and production processes have been imported into schools during periods of societal upheaval in order to create a sense of order and efficiency while meeting the objective of producing a workforce that meets the specifications set down by employers. Unlike other books that say why schools need to be reformed or how that reform should proceed, this study takes a critical look at the latest call to restructure schools in light of the economic, social, and political forces that affect the education establishment and the children of our nation.

Urban Teacher Education and Teaching
Urban Teacher Education and Teaching

Author: R. Patrick Solomon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-24

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 100010625X

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This volume illuminates the most pressing challenges faced by urban schools, teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher training programs and offers a range of insights and possibilities for urban teacher education and teaching. Covering issues spanning the broadly theoretical to the urgently practical, it goes beyond the traditional discourses in teacher education to focus on diversity, social justice, democratic schooling, and community building. What emerges is an emphatic message of hope for those committed to the ongoing project of improving urban teacher education and working in urban settings. Contributors from Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean bring rich and divergent knowledges, perspectives, and cultural experiences to their discussion of the three central themes around which the book is organized: • the conceptual framing of key issues in urban schooling; • pre-service teacher preparation for urban transformation; and • culturally relevant pedagogy and advocacy in urban settings. This book is intended for all students, practitioners, and researchers involved in urban education. It is appropriate as a text for student teaching and field experience seminars, and for courses dealing with social issues, educational policy, curriculum development, and multicultural teacher education.

Refinancing the College Dream
Refinancing the College Dream

Author: Edward P. St. John

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014-09-15

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 142141578X

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During the 1990s, rising tuition costs and inadequate federal grant aid prevented more than a million otherwise qualified, low-income students from continuing their education past high school. Education policy expert Edward P. St. John is troubled by this situation and argues that equal access to higher education is both feasible and just. In Refinancing the College Dream, he examines recent trends in public funding of education and explores alternatives to financing which would provide equal access to postsecondary education for all Americans. The growing gap in the rate of participation in higher education for low-income groups compared to upper-income groups over the past three decades, St. John finds, has been a direct result of the decreased availability of federal grants, even after taking into account such factors as an increased emphasis on strengthening high school graduation requirements. To reverse this trend, he suggests that policymakers refocus the debate over the public financing of higher education from taxpayer costs to principles of social responsibility and justice, along with economic theories of human capital. He then shows how improved coordination between state and federal agencies, expanded use of loans, and better targeting of grant aid can maximize access for low-income students while minimizing increases in taxes. Making higher education accessible to low-income students is one of the crucial challenges for citizens and policymakers in the early twenty-first century. Refinancing the College Dream offers a theoretical and practical foundation for boldly rethinking the financial strategies used by colleges and universities, states, and the federal government to accomplish this essential goal.

School Leadership for Authentic Family and Community Partnerships
School Leadership for Authentic Family and Community Partnerships

Author: Susan Auerbach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-05-22

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 113670714X

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School leaders are increasingly called upon to pursue meaningful partnerships with families and community groups, yet many leaders are unprepared to meet the challenges of partnerships, to cross cultural boundaries, or to be accountable to the community. Alliances are needed among educators, families, and community groups that value relationship building, dialogue, and power-sharing as part of socially just, democratic schools. This book brings together research perspectives that intersect the fields of leadership and partnerships to inform and inspire more authentic collaboration. Contributors from the fields of educational leadership, family engagement, school-community partnerships, and education for social justice come together to examine the role of educational leaders in promoting partnerships as a dimension of leadership for social justice. The volume offers a mix of empirical, conceptual, and reflective chapters with research representing qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches in urban, suburban, and rural schools. The chapter, "Conversations with Community-Oriented Leaders," includes candid advice from district and school-level administrators on this under-documented aspect of leadership. Situating leadership for partnerships within the leadership literature, this book proposes a model for addressing tensions embedded in home-school relations and leading schools toward more authentic relationships with stakeholders. This collection of original scholarly articles will be a unique resource for new and aspiring administrators and for researchers in both the fields of leadership and school-family-community partnerships.

Schools and Society
Schools and Society

Author: Jeanne H. Ballantine

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2017-10-25

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1544302398

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The authors are proud sponsors of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. This comprehensive anthology features classical readings on the sociology of education, as well as current, original essays by notable contemporary scholars. Assigned as a main text or a supplement, this fully updated Sixth Edition uses the open systems approach to provide readers with a framework for understanding and analyzing the book’s range of topics. Jeanne H. Ballantine, Joan Z. Spade, and new co-editor Jenny M. Stuber, all experienced researchers and instructors in this subject, have chosen articles that are highly readable, and that represent the field’s major theoretical perspectives, methods, and issues. The Sixth Edition includes twenty new selections and five revisions of original readings and features new perspectives on some of the most contested issues in the field today, such as school funding, gender issues in schools, parent and neighborhood influences on learning, growing inequality in schools, and charter schools.

Education Reform and the Limits of Policy
Education Reform and the Limits of Policy

Author: Michael Addonizio

Publisher: W.E. Upjohn Institute

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0880993871

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While there is no doubt that an abundance of newly enacted education policies abounds across the state and across the nation, more fundamental questions remain. What is the nature of these reforms? What do they hope to accomplish? How successful have they been? In this book, we attempt to provide some answers to these questions by examining a major set of education policy reforms undertaken in Michigan and across the country over the past 20 or more years. These innovations include finance reform, state assessment of student performance, a series of school accountability measures, charter schools, schools of choice, and, for Detroit, a bevy of oft-conflicting policies and reform efforts that have belabored but seldom helped its public schools. In the pages that follow, we examine the decidedly mixed outcomes and effects of this large array of reform policies and programs. Each chapter addresses a specific policy area, outlining reform activity across the nation with an emphasis on Michigan's efforts as well as on one or two states that led these changes.