Education And The Commercial Mindset

Download or read book Education and the Commercial Mindset written by Samuel E. Abrams and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s commitment to public schooling once seemed unshakable. But today the movement to privatize K–12 education is stronger than ever. Samuel E. Abrams examines the rise of market forces in public education and reveals how a commercial mindset has taken over. “[An] outstanding book.” —Carol Burris, Washington Post “Given the near-complete absence of public information and debate about the stealth effort to privatize public schools, this is the right time for the appearance of [this book]. Samuel E. Abrams, a veteran teacher and administrator, has written an elegant analysis of the workings of market forces in education.” —Diane Ravitch, New York Review of Books “Education and the Commercial Mindset provides the most detailed and comprehensive analysis of the school privatization movement to date. Students of American education will learn a great deal from it.” —Leo Casey, Dissent

Download or read book Education and the Commercial Mindset written by Samuel E. Abrams and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s commitment to public schooling once seemed unshakable. But today the movement to privatize K–12 education is stronger than ever. Samuel E. Abrams examines the rise of market forces in public education and reveals how a commercial mindset has taken over. “[An] outstanding book.” —Carol Burris, Washington Post “Given the near-complete absence of public information and debate about the stealth effort to privatize public schools, this is the right time for the appearance of [this book]. Samuel E. Abrams, a veteran teacher and administrator, has written an elegant analysis of the workings of market forces in education.” —Diane Ravitch, New York Review of Books “Education and the Commercial Mindset provides the most detailed and comprehensive analysis of the school privatization movement to date. Students of American education will learn a great deal from it.” —Leo Casey, Dissent

Download or read book Someone Has to Fail written by David F. Labaree and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Inside Charter Schools written by Bruce Fuller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deepening disaffection with conventional public schools has inspired flight to private schools, home schooling, and new alternatives, such as charter schools. Barely a decade old, the charter school movement has attracted a colorful band of supporters, from presidential candidates, to ethnic activists, to the religious Right. At present there are about 1,700 charter schools, with total enrollment estimated to reach one million early in the century. Yet, until now, little has been known about the inner workings of these small, inventive schools that rely on public money but are largely independent of local school boards. Inside Charter Schools takes readers into six strikingly different schools, from an evangelical home-schooling charter in California to a back-to-basics charter in a black neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan. With a keen eye for human aspirations and dilemmas, the authors provide incisive analysis of the challenges and problems facing this young movement. Do charter schools really spur innovation, or do they simply exacerbate tribal forms of American pluralism? Inside Charter Schools provides shrewd and illuminating studies of the struggles and achievements of these new schools, and offers practical lessons for educators, scholars, policymakers, and parents.

Download or read book The Blackboard and the Bottom Line written by Larry Cuban and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an incisive examination of the cliché that schools should be more businesslike, the author demonstrates why no one has shown that a business model can be successfully applied to education.

Download or read book Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools written by Lydia G. Segal and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2004 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing a brand new perspective on why our public schools are failing and what to do about it, Lydia Segal reveals how systemic waste and corruption cripple education and offers a feasible prescription for how to tackle their root causes and reclaim our schools. This eye-opening book exposes how embedded waste and fraud deplete classroom resources, block initiative, and distort educational priorities and explains how to remedy the problem. Drawing on extensive interviews and investigative research in America's three largest districts, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Segal argues that the problem is not usually bad people, but a bad system that focuses on process at the expense of results. She shows how regulations that were established to curb waste and fraud provide perverse incentives. Districts following rules designed to save every penny spend thousands of dollars to hunt down checks for amounts as small as $25. To fix leaky toilets, caring principals may have to pay workers under the table because submitting a work order through the central office, with its many fraud checks, could take years. Meanwhile, those who pilfer from classrooms may get away because the pyramidal structure of large districts makes schools inherently difficult to oversee. Drawing on initiatives in successful districts, Segal offers pragmatic solutions and a detailed blueprint for reform. She calls for radically restructuring districts, empowering principals, and establishing new, less stifling forms of accountability that put a premium on performance. As reformers grapple with the dismal state of education in America, this timely work offers a bold, far-reaching plan for improving public schools.

Download or read book Beyond Test Scores written by Jack Schneider and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.