From Teach For America to Teach For China

From Teach For America to Teach For China
Author: Sara Lam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2019-11-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429833652

This book examines the role of Teach For China in addressing educational equity and expanding public participation in education. The author uses the case of Teach For China to explore the broader theme of the mobility of education models between contexts characterized by neoliberalism and those characterized by strong state control. Transnational advocacy networks are increasingly influential in the education policy making process. These networks, comprised of entrepreneurs and education corporations, think tanks, philanthropists, and government agencies, facilitate the global mobility of policy models. It is widely accepted that an education model should not be transplanted from one context to another without careful consideration of how contextual differences might impact the model’s effectiveness. The book explores the argument that the same model is not only quantitatively different in terms of effectiveness, but that models can play qualitatively different roles in neoliberal and strong-state contexts, sometimes moving education reform in opposite directions. The book will appeal to anyone interested in global teacher education reform and equity in education.

Reading With Patrick

Reading With Patrick
Author: Michelle Kuo
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-07-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1447286065

As a young English teacher keen to make a difference in the world, Michelle Kuo took a job at a tough school in the Mississippi Delta, sharing books and poetry with a young African-American teenager named Patrick and his classmates. For the first time, these kids began to engage with ideas and dreams beyond their small town, and to gain an insight into themselves that they had never had before. Two years later, Michelle left to go to law school; but Patrick began to lose his way, ending up jailed for murder. And that’s when Michelle decided that her work was not done, and began to visit Patrick once a week, and soon every day, to read with him again. Reading with Patrick is an inspirational story of friendship, a coming-of-age story for both a young teacher and a student, an expansive, deeply resonant meditation on education, race and justice, and a love letter to literature and its power to transcend social barriers.

Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics

Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics
Author: Liping Ma
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2010-03-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135149496

Studies of teachers in the U.S. often document insufficient subject matter knowledge in mathematics. Yet, these studies give few examples of the knowledge teachers need to support teaching, particularly the kind of teaching demanded by recent reforms in mathematics education. Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics describes the nature and development of the knowledge that elementary teachers need to become accomplished mathematics teachers, and suggests why such knowledge seems more common in China than in the United States, despite the fact that Chinese teachers have less formal education than their U.S. counterparts. The anniversary edition of this bestselling volume includes the original studies that compare U.S and Chinese elementary school teachers’ mathematical understanding and offers a powerful framework for grasping the mathematical content necessary to understand and develop the thinking of school children. Highlighting notable changes in the field and the author’s work, this new edition includes an updated preface, introduction, and key journal articles that frame and contextualize this seminal work.

Little Soldiers

Little Soldiers
Author: Lenora Chu
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2017-09-19
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0062367870

New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice; Real Simple Best of the Month; Library Journal Editors’ Pick In the spirit of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Bringing up Bébé, and The Smartest Kids in the World, a hard-hitting exploration of China’s widely acclaimed yet insular education system that raises important questions for the future of American parenting and education When students in Shanghai rose to the top of international rankings in 2009, Americans feared that they were being "out-educated" by the rising super power. An American journalist of Chinese descent raising a young family in Shanghai, Lenora Chu noticed how well-behaved Chinese children were compared to her boisterous toddler. How did the Chinese create their academic super-achievers? Would their little boy benefit from Chinese school? Chu and her husband decided to enroll three-year-old Rainer in China’s state-run public school system. The results were positive—her son quickly settled down, became fluent in Mandarin, and enjoyed his friends—but she also began to notice troubling new behaviors. Wondering what was happening behind closed classroom doors, she embarked on an exploratory journey, interviewing Chinese parents, teachers, and education professors, and following students at all stages of their education. What she discovered is a military-like education system driven by high-stakes testing, with teachers posting rankings in public, using bribes to reward students who comply, and shaming to isolate those who do not. At the same time, she uncovered a years-long desire by government to alleviate its students’ crushing academic burden and make education friendlier for all. The more she learns, the more she wonders: Are Chinese children—and her son—paying too high a price for their obedience and the promise of future academic prowess? Is there a way to appropriate the excellence of the system but dispense with the bad? What, if anything, could Westerners learn from China’s education journey? Chu’s eye-opening investigation challenges our assumptions and asks us to consider the true value and purpose of education.

Examining Teach For All

Examining Teach For All
Author: Matthew A.M. Thomas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-07-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000094642

*Winner, 2022 Outstanding Book Award from the Society of Professors of Education* *Winner, 2021 Book Award from the Globalization and Education SIG, Comparative and International Education Society* Examining Teach For All brings together research focused on Teach For All and its affiliate programmes to explore the organisation’s impact on education around the world. Teach For All is an expanding global network of programmes in more than 50 countries that aim to radically transform education systems by recruiting talented graduates to teach for two years in under-resourced schools and developing them into lifelong advocates of reform. The volume offers nuanced insights into the interests and contexts shaping Teach For All and the challenges and possibilities inherent in broader efforts to enact education reform on a global scale. This volume is the first of its kind to present empirical research on the emergence and expansion of Teach For All programmes, which replicate and adapt the Teach For America model around the world. The volume traces the network’s expansion from its initial launch in 2007 to its growing international presence, as chapters present new research from national contexts as diverse as Bangladesh, Lebanon, and Spain. Using evidence from a range of perspectives and research methodologies, the chapters collectively highlight the ways in which Teach For All and its affiliate programmes are working to alter educational landscapes worldwide. This book will be of great interest for scholars, educators, post-graduate students, and policymakers in the fields of comparative education, teacher education, education leadership, and education policy. It paves the way for future critical inquiry into this expanding global network as well as further investigations of educational change around the world.

The Shame of the Nation

The Shame of the Nation
Author: Jonathan Kozol
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2006-08-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1400052459

Since the early 1980s, when the federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation of black children has reverted to its highest level since 1968. In many inner-city schools, a stick-and-carrot method of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons is now used with students. Meanwhile, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society. Filled with the passionate voices of children, principals, and teachers, and some of the most revered leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.

Teacher

Teacher
Author: Michael Copperman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2016-08-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496805860

When Michael Copperman left Stanford University for the Mississippi Delta in 2002, he imagined he would lift underprivileged children from the narrow horizons of rural poverty. Well-meaning but naïve, the Asian American from the West Coast soon lost his bearings in a world divided between black and white. He had no idea how to manage a classroom or help children navigate the considerable challenges they faced. In trying to help students, he often found he couldn't afford to give what they required--sometimes with heartbreaking consequences. His desperate efforts to save child after child were misguided but sincere. He offered children the best invitations to success he could manage. But he still felt like an outsider who was failing the children and himself. Teach For America has for a decade been the nation's largest employer of recent college graduates but has come under increasing criticism in recent years even as it has grown exponentially. This memoir considers the distance between the idealism of the organization's creed that "One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education and reach their full potential" and what it actually means to teach in America's poorest and most troubled public schools. Copperman's memoir vividly captures his disorientation in the divided world of the Delta, even as the author marvels at the wit and resilience of the children in his classroom. To them, he is at once an authority figure and a stranger minority than even they are--a lone Asian, an outsider among outsiders. His journey is of great relevance to teachers, administrators, and parents longing for quality education in America. His frank story shows that the solutions for impoverished schools are far from simple.

Love, Teach

Love, Teach
Author: Kelly Treleaven
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0525533168

Hopeful, hilarious musings and serious advice for new teachers from the formerly anonymous blogger behind Love, Teach. Every teacher will tell you the first years are the hardest, and even the most confident of the pack sometimes ask themselves, Am I cut out for this? Kelly Treleaven, the teacher and once-anonymous blogger behind Love, Teach, wants you to know that you're not alone, and that yes, she has cried under her desk, too. Treleaven's blog has become a sensation in the education world, known for its heartfelt, high-spirited dispatches straight from the trenches and its practical advice. In Treleaven's debut book, she gives rookie teachers the advice she wishes she'd had when she started out in a large district in Houston. From logistical questions like how to prep and organize a classroom, to deeper issues like how to build relationships with students, navigate administration, and avoid burnout, Love, Teach is an essential book for anyone working in education today or considering the profession. With raw feeling, humor, and a razor-sharp perspective, Love, Teach supports teachers in their fight for a better future, and helps them celebrate the victories, large and small.

The Transformation of Title IX

The Transformation of Title IX
Author: R. Shep Melnick
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-03-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0815732406

One civil rights-era law has reshaped American society—and contributed to the country's ongoing culture wars Few laws have had such far-reaching impact as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Intended to give girls and women greater access to sports programs and other courses of study in schools and colleges, the law has since been used by judges and agencies to expand a wide range of antidiscrimination policies—most recently the Obama administration’s 2016 mandates on sexual harassment and transgender rights. In this comprehensive review of how Title IX has been implemented, Boston College political science professor R. Shep Melnick analyzes how interpretations of "equal educational opportunity" have changed over the years. In terms accessible to non-lawyers, Melnick examines how Title IX has become a central part of legal and political campaigns to correct gender stereotypes, not only in academic settings but in society at large. Title IX thus has become a major factor in America's culture wars—and almost certainly will remain so for years to come.

The Power of Teacher Networks

The Power of Teacher Networks
Author: Ellen Meyers
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1412967171

This is a simple, effective idea that should have been thought of sooner. Kung Fu Phonics teaches phonics, i.e. the rules of "sounding out" words, through phonetics. Q: How do you say "phone?" A: /fon/ Phonics books out today (chockablock with happy hippos and grinning giraffes) are aimed at kindergartners. 4th-grade kids consider them "baby books." Phonetics texts are all daunting tomes for grad students of comparative linguistics and philology, and buying one will put you out fifty dollars No book has used the one to teach the other, until KUNG FU PHONICS. Phonetics has only ever been used to describe how words sound. Kung Fu Phonics is the first to employ phonetics PREDICTIVELY, asking students to describe how unfamiliar words SHOULD sound. Kung Fu Phonics is great for teaching K and pre-K kids to read, and with them you can skip the phonetic notations and just have them read and say the words. It's also a fine tool for teaching English to non-native speakers of any age. If your child is reading below grade level, spend twenty minutes a day with him studying phonetics with this book. Phonetics is just a tool, an uncomplicated but exacting series of squiggles. It's a nice bit of misdirection He'll complain about phonetics and how useless it is while you're doing something awfully concrete to bolster his reading skills: teaching PHONICS. (And since he's learning something his classmates aren't, it doesn't have the embarrassing feel of remediation.) It's an 88-page workbook. Twenty-five lessons, five model words and fifty exercise words per lesson. Concise instructions keep almost every lesson to two pages. And the instructions are so clear that anyone who reads English on a high-school level can use Kung Fu Phonics to teach reading. (Alas, you can't just toss it to a kindergartner and tell her to get busy; it requires cooperative effort.) It requires no DVD or audio CD to use; it's ready to teach as is. This is the American English edition of KUNG FU PHONICS. It uses American (Merriam-Webster) phonetics and describes American pronunciations.