The Hope For American School Reform

The Hope of American School Reform tells the story of the origins of the reform in science and math education. The book is drawn, in part, on new research from previously untapped archival sources. The aim of this work is to contribute to our understanding of a major effort to reform school curricula.

Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation’s largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge—launched in 1994—alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hope—that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better.

Two persistent dilemmas haunt school reform: curriculum politics and classroom constancy. Both undermined the 1960s' new social studies, a dynamic reform movement centered on inquiry, issues, and social activism. Dramatic academic freedom controversies ended reform and led to a conservative restoration. On one side were teachers and curriculum developers; on the other, conservative activists determined to undo the revolutions of the 1960s. The episode brought a return to traditional history, a turn away from questioning, and the re-imposition of authority. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, The Tragedy of American School Reform offers a provocative perspective on current trends.

A moving portrait of school reform in New Orleans through the eyes of the students and educators living it.

Schlechty shows both educators and parents how to envision reform and design quality educational systems. He explains how the visioning process must be rooted in real shared beliefs, how mission statements must unpack visions into concrete goals that are connected to action, and how the results of reform can be usefully assessed. Drawing on the author's vast experience in the day-to-day work of implementing school reform, Inventing Better Schools offers new approaches for setting standards and ensuring accountability--and includes samples of actual mission statements and strategic plans of successful school districts.

Reading the philosophy of Immanuel Levinas against postcolonial theories of difference, particularly those of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Édouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos, John E. Drabinski reconceives notions of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics and provides new perspectives on these important postcolonial theorists. He also underscores Levinas's relevance to related disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

Berube analyzes the three great educational reform movements and shows how they were shaped by the societal forces of the Progressive Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and foreign economic competition.

From America's "most prominent school reformer" (LOS ANGELES TIMES) comes a stirring personal meditation on what works-and what doesn't-in our high schools today. Revisiting America's classrooms, Sizer assesses the changes over the past decade and a half - from school choice to interdisciplinary learning - that give us reason to be hopeful. Tracy Kidder has called this"an eloquent book."

The Futures of School Reform represents the culminating work of a three-year discussion among national education leaders convened by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Based on the recognition that current education reform efforts have reached their limits, the volume maps out a variety of bold visions that push the boundaries of our current thinking. Taken together, these visions identify the leverage points for generating dramatic change and highlight critical trade-offs among different courses of action. The goal of this book is not to present a menu of options. Rather, it is to surface contrasting assumptions, tensions, constraints, and opportunities, so that together we can better understand—and act on—the choices that lie before us.

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.