Schooling Reform In Hard Times

Schooling Reform In Hard Times
Author: Bob Linguard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135722072

Based on research carried out under Labour governments throughout the 1990s in Western Australia, the authors consider the social, political and economic conditions under which policy is formulated, understood and enacted. They look at how the state structure affects the content and nature of policy statements and provide an outline of the history of policy developments and point to future possibilities and probabilities. Outcomes within funding ceilings, accountability frameworks and national guidelines are but some of the changes referred to. The emergence of competency-based standards in education and training in schools, workplaces and the professions is evident throughout Australia at state level, but the concern is whether issues of education should be played out within the state and outside civil society. The authors argue for the mediation in implementation of policy - rather than a lambasting of policy formulation and implementation. This text is intended for heads of education departments, PGCE, BEd. MEd. students and researchers interested in education policy and planning. Education policymakers, and educational historians.

Public Schools in Hard Times

Public Schools in Hard Times
Author: David B. Tyack
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1984
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674738003

In the first social history of what happened to public schools in those "years of the locust," the authors explore the daily experience of schoolchildren in many kinds of communities--the public school students of working-class northeastern towns, the rural black children of the South, the prosperous adolescents of midwestern suburbs. How did educators respond to the fiscal crisis, and why did Americans retain their faith in public schooling during the cataclysm? The authors examine how New Dealers regarded public education and the reaction of public school people to the distinctive New Deal style in programs such as the National Youth Administration. They illustrate the story with photographs, cartoons, and vignettes of life behind the schoolhouse door. Moving from that troubled period to our own, the authors compare the anxieties of the depression decade with the uncertainties of the 1970s and 1980s. Heirs to an optimistic tradition and trained to manage growth, school staff have lately encountered three shortages: of pupils, money, and public confidence. Professional morale has dropped as expectations and criticism have mounted. Changes in the governing and financing of education have made planning for the future even riskier than usual. Drawing on the experience of the 1930s to illuminate the problems of the 1980s, the authors lend historical perspective to current discussions about the future of public education. They stress the basic stability of public education while emphasizing the unfinished business of achieving equality in schooling.

Hard Times

Hard Times
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1854
Genre: Authors, English
ISBN:

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.

Teaching Difficult Histories in Difficult Times

Teaching Difficult Histories in Difficult Times
Author: Lauren McArthur Harris
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0807780774

Despite limitations and challenges, teaching about difficult histories is an essential aspect of social studies courses and units across grade levels. This practical resource highlights stories of K–12 practitioners who have critically examined and reflected on their experiences with planning and teaching histories identified as difficult. Featuring the voices of teacher educators, classroom teachers, and museum educators, these stories provide readers with rare examples of how to plan for, teach, and reflect on difficult histories. The book is divided into four main sections: Centering Difficult History Content, Centering Teacher and Student Identities, Centering Local and Contemporary Contexts, and Centering Teacher Decision-making. Key topics include teaching about genocide, slavery, immigration, war, racial violence, and terrorism. This dynamic book highlights the practitioner’s perspective to reveal how teachers can and do think critically about their motivations and the methods they use to engage students in rigorous, complex, and appropriate studies of the past. Book Features: Expanded notions of what difficult histories can be and how they can be approached pedagogically.Thoughtful pictures of practice of some of the most complex histories to teach. Stories of K–12 teachers and museum educators with the research of leading scholars in social studies education. Examples from a wide range of educational contexts in the United States and other countries. Resources useful to teachers and teacher educators. Contributors include LaGarrett J. King, Cinthia Salinas, Stephanie van Hover, Amanda Vickery, Sohyun An, H. James (Jim) Garrett, Christopher C. Martell, and Jennifer Hauver.

'Hanging in with Kids' in Tough Times

'Hanging in with Kids' in Tough Times
Author: John Smyth
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2010
Genre: Children with social disabilities
ISBN: 9781433106736

This book brings a unique, innovative and refreshing perspective to one of the most protracted issues affecting young lives - disengagement from schooling. Rather than continuing to blame young people, as most educational policies do, this book examines disengagement from the vantage point of the lives, experiences, interests and aspirations of the communities from which young people come, and within which they are embedded. It uses a narrative and representational approach that gives detailed insights into the wider context of poverty, class, power, relationships and identity. A major and defining hallmark of the book is the emphasis it places upon a number of 'doings', - including community voice, identity formation, critical work education and education policy - all of which provide a very different set of scripts with which to reinvent the institution of high school.

Education, Globalisation and New Times

Education, Globalisation and New Times
Author: Stephen J. Ball
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2007-03-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134093284

Education, Globalisation and New Times comprises a selection of the most influential papers published over the twenty-one years of the Journal of Education Policy. Written by many of the leading scholars in the field, these seminal papers cover a variety of subjects, sectors and levels of education, focused around the following major themes: education, globalisation and new times policy theory and method policy and equity. Compiled by the journal's editors, Stephen Ball, Ivor Goodson and Meg Maguire, the book illustrates the development of the field of education policy studies, and the specially written Introduction contextualises the selection, whilst introducing students to the main issues and current thinking in the field.

So Much Reform, So Little Change

So Much Reform, So Little Change
Author: Charles M. Payne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2008
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This frank and courageous book explores the persistence of failure in today's urban schools. At its heart is the argument that most education policy discussions are disconnected from the daily realities of urban schools, especially those in poor and beleaguered neighborhoods. Charles M. Payne argues that we have failed to account fully for the weakness of the social infrastructure and the often dysfunctional organizational environments of urban schools and school systems. The result is that liberals and conservatives alike have spent a great deal of time pursuing questions of limited practical value in the effort to improve city schools. Payne carefully delineates these stubborn and intertwined sources of failure in urban school reform efforts of the past two decades. Yet while his book is unsparing in its exploration of the troubled recent history of urban school reform, Payne also describes himself as "guardedly optimistic." He describes how, in the last decade, we have developed real insights into the roots of school failure, and into how some individual schools manage to improve. He also examines recent progress in understanding how particular urban districts have established successful reforms on a larger scale. Drawing on a striking array of sources--from the recent history of various urban school systems, to the growing sophistication of education research, to his own experience as a teacher, scholar, and participant in reform efforts--Payne paints a vivid and unmistakably realistic portrait of urban schools and reforms of the past few decades. So Much Reform, So Little Change will be required reading for everyone interested in the plight--and the future--of urban schools.

Work Hard. Be Nice.

Work Hard. Be Nice.
Author: Jay Mathews
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2009-01-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1565126734

When Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin signed up for Teach for America right after college and found themselves utter failures in the classroom, they vowed to remake themselves into superior educators. They did that—and more. In their early twenties, by sheer force of talent and determination never to take no for an answer, they created a wildly successful fifth-grade experience that would grow into the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which today includes sixty-six schools in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. KIPP schools incorporate what Feinberg and Levin learned from America's best, most charismatic teachers: lessons need to be lively; school days need to be longer (the KIPP day is nine and a half hours); the completion of homework has to be sacrosanct (KIPP teachers are available by telephone day and night). Chants, songs, and slogans such as "Work hard, be nice" energize the program. Illuminating the ups and downs of the KIPP founders and their students, Mathews gives us something quite rare: a hopeful book about education.

Leading Schools in Challenging Times

Leading Schools in Challenging Times
Author: Bruce Anthony Jones
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 168123369X

Over the past 30 years our public school system has received an unprecedented amount of attention as this concerns methods of school reform and policy strategies for bringing about this reform. During the 1980s the emphasis of school reform was on transparency through school-community partnerships. Business and philanthropy, for example, became involved with issues of schooling that was unheard of prior to this period. The 1980s also gave rise to issues of school finance and student performance that went beyond traditional views that tended to focus on finance “adequacy” to views that focused more on school finance arrangements that would lead to actual “equitable outcomes” in student performance. The 1990s witnessed the emergence of the comprehensive school reform movement whereby curriculum outsourcing occurred at rates that had never occurred before. With this movement, the role of teachers and school leaders in the creation of school curriculum diminished as school districts increasingly purchased vendor-related curriculum packages, which included teacher and leader training modules and methods of curriculum assessment. On the heels of the increasing tendency of school districts to outsource school curriculum to curriculum-vendors came a rise in demands for school accountability and school outcomes. This was particularly evident with the passage of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2001). NCLB was also developed within a political context that called for demands in the academic improvement of schools and school districts that housed historically disenfranchised students. These demands were particularly important as the nation experienced and continues to experience dramatic increases in student racial and ethnic diversity. This volume, entitled, Leading Schools in Challenging Times: Eye to the Future, discusses varying types of school leadership in the context of key topics that have been at the center of on-going school reform in the United States. These topics include challenges, opportunities and issues associated with our administrator and teacher leadership pipeline, preparation and development; leadership and school finance reform, leadership and changing student and population demographics; leadership and the role of community; issues of leadership, policy, public accountability and school performance outcomes. The authors also explicate these issues with a view to the future and the status of leadership in our public school system.