Reinterpreting Urban School Reform

Download or read book Reinterpreting Urban School Reform written by Louis F. Miron and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have urban schools failed, or has reform failed urban schools? This book examines existing urban school programs, ranging from desegregation to reading improvement, in light of available historical, empirical, and case study evidence. Miron and St. John and their contributors probe the underlying theoretical, normative, and political assumptions embedded in specific reform initiatives. They explore how reforms might be reconstructed to better address the underlying challenges and they demonstrate that reforms can be constructively critiqued throughout the stages of implementation, arguing that greater attention should be paid to ethnic and cultural traditions within urban educational settings. Contributors include Leetta Allen-Haynes; Joseph Cadray; Choong-Geun Chung; Richard Fossey; Barry M. Franklin; David Gordon; Carol Anne Hossler; Siri Loescher; Kim Manoil; Genevieve Manset; Louis F. Mirón; Glenda Droogsma Musoba; Kathryn Nakagawa; Carolyn S. Ridenour; Ada B. Simmons; Edward P. St. John; Neil Theobald; Sandra Washburn; Kenneth K. Wong; and Kim Worthington.

Download or read book Student Voice in School Reform written by Dana L. Mitra and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High schools continue to be places that isolate, alienate, and disengage students. But what would happen if students were viewed as part of the solution in schools rather than part of the problem? This book examines the emergence of "student voice" at one high school in the San Francisco Bay area where educators went straight to the source and asked the students to help. Struggling, like many high schools, with how to improve student outcomes, educators at Whitman High School decided to invite students to participate in the reform process. Dana L. Mitra describes the evolution of student voice at Whitman, showing that the students enthusiastically created partnerships with teachers and administrators, engaged in meaningful discussion about why so many failed or dropped out, and partnered with teachers and principals to improve learning for themselves and their peers. In documenting the difference that student voice made, this book helps expand ideas of distributed leadership, professional learning communities, and collaboration. The book also contributes much needed research on what student voice initiatives look like in practice and provides powerful evidence of ways in which young people can increase their sense of agency and their sense of belonging in school.

Download or read book Curriculum, Community, and Urban School Reform written by B. Franklin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asserts that efforts to reform schools, particularly urban schools, are events that engender a host of issues and conflicts that have been interpreted through the conceptual lens of community.

Download or read book Parent-School Collaboration written by Mary E. Henry and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-02-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines in close detail public schools' relationships with their parents and communities.

Download or read book Refinancing the College Dream written by Edward P. St. John and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1990s, rising tuition costs and inadequate federal grant aid prevented more than a million otherwise qualified, low-income students from continuing their education past high school. Education policy expert Edward P. St. John is troubled by this situation and argues that equal access to higher education is both feasible and just. In Refinancing the College Dream, he examines recent trends in public funding of education and explores alternatives to financing which would provide equal access to postsecondary education for all Americans. The growing gap in the rate of participation in higher education for low-income groups compared to upper-income groups over the past three decades, St. John finds, has been a direct result of the decreased availability of federal grants, even after taking into account such factors as an increased emphasis on strengthening high school graduation requirements. To reverse this trend, he suggests that policymakers refocus the debate over the public financing of higher education from taxpayer costs to principles of social responsibility and justice, along with economic theories of human capital. He then shows how improved coordination between state and federal agencies, expanded use of loans, and better targeting of grant aid can maximize access for low-income students while minimizing increases in taxes. Making higher education accessible to low-income students is one of the crucial challenges for citizens and policymakers in the early twenty-first century. Refinancing the College Dream offers a theoretical and practical foundation for boldly rethinking the financial strategies used by colleges and universities, states, and the federal government to accomplish this essential goal.

Download or read book School Leadership for Authentic Family and Community Partnerships written by Susan Auerbach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: School leaders are increasingly called upon to pursue meaningful partnerships with families and community groups, yet many leaders are unprepared to meet the challenges of partnerships, to cross cultural boundaries, or to be accountable to the community. Alliances are needed among educators, families, and community groups that value relationship building, dialogue, and power-sharing as part of socially just, democratic schools. This book brings together research perspectives that intersect the fields of leadership and partnerships to inform and inspire more authentic collaboration. Contributors from the fields of educational leadership, family engagement, school-community partnerships, and education for social justice come together to examine the role of educational leaders in promoting partnerships as a dimension of leadership for social justice. The volume offers a mix of empirical, conceptual, and reflective chapters with research representing qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches in urban, suburban, and rural schools. The chapter, "Conversations with Community-Oriented Leaders," includes candid advice from district and school-level administrators on this under-documented aspect of leadership. Situating leadership for partnerships within the leadership literature, this book proposes a model for addressing tensions embedded in home-school relations and leading schools toward more authentic relationships with stakeholders. This collection of original scholarly articles will be a unique resource for new and aspiring administrators and for researchers in both the fields of leadership and school-family-community partnerships.

Download or read book Schools and Society written by Jeanne H. Ballantine and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2017-10-25 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors are proud sponsors of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. This comprehensive anthology features classical readings on the sociology of education, as well as current, original essays by notable contemporary scholars. Assigned as a main text or a supplement, this fully updated Sixth Edition uses the open systems approach to provide readers with a framework for understanding and analyzing the book’s range of topics. Jeanne H. Ballantine, Joan Z. Spade, and new co-editor Jenny M. Stuber, all experienced researchers and instructors in this subject, have chosen articles that are highly readable, and that represent the field’s major theoretical perspectives, methods, and issues. The Sixth Edition includes twenty new selections and five revisions of original readings and features new perspectives on some of the most contested issues in the field today, such as school funding, gender issues in schools, parent and neighborhood influences on learning, growing inequality in schools, and charter schools.