James Baldwin and the American Schoolhouse

James Baldwin and the American Schoolhouse
Author: Carl A. Grant
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2021-04-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000376176

This book – written for teacher educators, teachers and admirers of James Baldwin –employs his essays and speeches to discuss how the effects of race and racism enter the souls of African American students and become attached and difficult to dislodge. Yet, his essays also provide educators and students with purpose, meaning and suggestions for how to stand up against racism, develop an authentic self and fight oppression. Whereas this book takes advantage of the full body of Baldwin’s work – fiction, nonfiction, interviews, lectures, speeches and letters – its foundation is three speeches James Baldwin gave in the 1960s on the education of African American children and African American and European American race relations in the United States. The purpose of education, defying myths, freedom, willful ignorance and developing identity are discussed through a Baldwinian lens. African American and European American teachers are encouraged to "Go for Broke" as this book explores the important role Baldwin’s work can play in schools and universities.

The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them

The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them
Author: Daniel L. Schwartz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2016-07-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 039370940X

Selected as one of NPR's Best Books of 2016, this book offers superior learning tools for teachers and students, from A to Z. An explosive growth in research on how people learn has revealed many ways to improve teaching and catalyze learning at all ages. The purpose of this book is to present this new science of learning so that educators can creatively translate the science into exceptional practice. The book is highly appropriate for the preparation and professional development of teachers and college faculty, but also parents, trainers, instructional designers, psychology students, and simply curious folks interested in improving their own learning. Based on a popular Stanford University course, The ABCs of How We Learn uses a novel format that is suitable as both a textbook and a popular read. With everyday language, engaging examples, a sense of humor, and solid evidence, it describes 26 unique ways that students learn. Each chapter offers a concise and approachable breakdown of one way people learn, how it works, how we know it works, how and when to use it, and what mistakes to avoid. The book presents learning research in a way that educators can creatively translate into exceptional lessons and classroom practice. The book covers field-defining learning theories ranging from behaviorism (R is for Reward) to cognitive psychology (S is for Self-Explanation) to social psychology (O is for Observation). The chapters also introduce lesser-known theories exceptionally relevant to practice, such as arousal theory (X is for eXcitement). Together the theories, evidence, and strategies from each chapter can be combined endlessly to create original and effective learning plans and the means to know if they succeed.

The Other School Reformers

The Other School Reformers
Author: Adam Laats
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2015-02-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674416716

The idea that American education has been steered by progressivism is accepted as fact by liberals and conservatives alike. Adam Laats shows that this belief is wrong. Calling to center stage conservatives who shaped America’s classrooms, he shows that in the long march of American public education, progressive reform has been a beleaguered dream.

Tinkering toward Utopia

Tinkering toward Utopia
Author: David B. TYACK
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674044525

For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices. In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to reinvent schooling? Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.

Earl the Pearl

Earl the Pearl
Author: Robert Blake Jackson
Publisher: Henry Z. Walck, Incorporated
Total Pages: 63
Release: 1969
Genre: Basketball
ISBN: 9780809820641

A biography of high scoring basketball guard, Earl Monroe, concentrating on his career with the Baltimore Bullets.

Beyond Test Scores

Beyond Test Scores
Author: Jack Schneider
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017-08-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674976398

When it comes to sizing up America’s public schools, test scores are the go-to metric of state policy makers and anxious parents looking to place their children in the “best” schools. Yet ample research indicates that standardized tests are a poor way to measure a school’s performance. It is time—indeed past time—to rethink this system, Jack Schneider says. Beyond Test Scores reframes current debates over school quality by offering new approaches to educational data that can push us past our unproductive fixation on test scores. Using the highly diverse urban school district of Somerville, Massachusetts, as a case study, Schneider and his research team developed a new framework to more fairly and comprehensively assess educational effectiveness. And by adopting a wide range of measures aligned with that framework, they were able to more accurately capture a broader array of school strengths and weaknesses. Their new data not only provided parents, educators, and administrators with a clearer picture of school performance, but also challenged misconceptions about what makes a good school. With better data, Schneider shows, stakeholders at the federal, state, and local levels can undo the damage of present accountability systems and build greater capacity in our schools. Policy makers, administrators, and school leaders can better identify where assistance is needed. Educators can engage in more evidence-based decision making. And parents can make better-informed choices for their children. Perhaps most importantly, better data can facilitate communication among all these groups, allowing them to take collective action toward shared, concrete goals.

Someone Has to Fail

Someone Has to Fail
Author: David F. Labaree
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674058860

What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children—but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way “this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.” Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult. At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes—to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own. Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.

James A. Garfield

James A. Garfield
Author: Jeff C. Young
Publisher: Enslow Publishing
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780766051003

A biography of the twentieth president of the United States, whose term was cut short when he was fatally wounded a few months after his inauguration. Includes Internet links to Web sites, source documents, and photographs related to James Garfield.

James Baldwin in Context

James Baldwin in Context
Author: D. Quentin Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108754546

James Baldwin in Context provides a wide-ranging collection of approaches to the work of an essential black American author who is just as relevant now as he was during his turbulent heyday in the mid-twentieth century. The perspectives range from those who knew Baldwin personally, to scholars who have dedicated decades to studying him, to a new generation of scholars for whom Baldwin is nearly a historical figure. This collection complements the ever-growing body of scholarship on Baldwin by combining traditional inroads into his work, such as music and expatriation, with new approaches, such as intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter movement.