Education and the Commercial Mindset

Education and the Commercial Mindset PDF Author: Samuel E. Abrams
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674049179
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
The movement to privatize K–12 education is stronger than ever. Samuel Abrams examines the rise of market forces in public education and reveals how a commercial mindset that sidesteps fundamental challenges has taken over. Nevertheless, public schools should adopt lessons from the business world, such as raising teacher salaries to attract talent.

Education and the Commercial Mindset

Education and the Commercial Mindset PDF Author: Samuel E. Abrams
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674049179
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book

Book Description
The movement to privatize K–12 education is stronger than ever. Samuel Abrams examines the rise of market forces in public education and reveals how a commercial mindset that sidesteps fundamental challenges has taken over. Nevertheless, public schools should adopt lessons from the business world, such as raising teacher salaries to attract talent.

The Ordeal of Equality

The Ordeal of Equality PDF Author: David K. Cohen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674053649
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
American schools have always been locally created and controlled. But ever since the Title I program in 1965 appropriated nearly one billion dollars for public schools, federal money and programs have been influencing every school in America. What has been accomplished in this extraordinary assertion of federal influence? What hasn't? Why not? With incisive clarity and wit, David Cohen and Susan Moffitt argue that enormous gaps existed between policies and programs, and the real-world practices that they attempted to change. Learning and teaching are complicated and mysterious. So the means to achieve admirable goals are uncertain, and difficult to develop and sustain, particularly when teachers get little help to cope with the blizzard of new programs, new slogans, new tests, and new rules. Ironically, as the authors observe, the least experienced and least well-trained teachers are often in the most needy schools, so federal support is compromised by the inequality it is intended to ameliorate. If new policies and programs don't include means to create the capability they require, they cannot succeed. We don't know what we need to enable states, school systems, schools, teachers, and students to use the resources that programs offer. The trouble with standards-based reform is that standards and tests still don't teach you how to teach.

Saving Schools

Saving Schools PDF Author: Paul E. Peterson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674050112
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this book Peterson interprets the history of American schools by placing major educational reformers in the context of their times and relates their thinking to our own era by scrutinizing the often unanticipated consequences of their commitments and ideas. These extraordinary individuals provided the critical ideas and articulated the ideals that motivated many others to search for ways to save the schools from the limitations in which they were embedded: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Al Shanker, William Bennett, and James S. Coleman. The drive to centralize was pervasive despite repeatedly expressed reform desire to customize education. Peterson argues that education has become an increasingly labor intensive industry that must reverse direction and become more capital intensive or it will descend in quality. Fortunately, technological change is making it possible radically alter the way in which education services are delivered, providing a new chance to save our schools.

Inside Charter Schools

Inside Charter Schools PDF Author: Bruce Fuller
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037421
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
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.

In Search of Deeper Learning

In Search of Deeper Learning PDF Author: Jal Mehta
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988396
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
"The best book on high school dynamics I have ever read."--Jay Mathews, Washington Post An award-winning professor and an accomplished educator take us beyond the hype of reform and inside some of America's most innovative classrooms to show what is working--and what isn't--in our schools. What would it take to transform industrial-era schools into modern organizations capable of supporting deep learning for all? Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine's quest to answer this question took them inside some of America's most innovative schools and classrooms--places where educators are rethinking both what and how students should learn. The story they tell is alternately discouraging and hopeful. Drawing on hundreds of hours of observations and interviews at thirty different schools, Mehta and Fine reveal that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And yet they find pockets of powerful learning at almost every school, often in electives and extracurriculars as well as in a few mold-breaking academic courses. These spaces achieve depth, the authors argue, because they emphasize purpose and choice, cultivate community, and draw on powerful traditions of apprenticeship. These outliers suggest that it is difficult but possible for schools and classrooms to achieve the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity. This boldly humanistic book offers a rich account of what education can be. The first panoramic study of American public high schools since the 1980s, In Search of Deeper Learning lays out a new vision for American education--one that will set the agenda for schools of the future.

From Teacher to Leader

From Teacher to Leader PDF Author: Starr Sackstein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781949595208
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Starr Sackstein's insight will help you make the best decisions for yourself and those you serve, whether you have already made the move into leadership or are wondering whether a role in administration is right for you . In this honest and practical guide, Sackstein prompts you to reflect as you stretch for personal and professional growth.

Someone Has to Fail

Someone Has to Fail PDF Author: David F. Labaree
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674063864
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all childrenÑbut all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way Òthis archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.Ó 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 purposesÑto 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.

Children as Pawns

Children as Pawns PDF Author: Timothy A. HACSI
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674038126
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Head Start. Bilingual education. Small class size. Social promotion. School funding. Virtually every school system in America has had to face these issues over the past thirty years. Advocates and dissenters have declared confidently that the research is on their side. But is it? In the first book to bring together the recent history of educational policy and politics with the research evidence, Timothy Hacsi presents the illuminating, often-forgotten stories of these five controversial topics. He sifts through the complicated evaluation research literature and compares the policies that have been adopted to the best evidence about what actually works. He lucidly explains what the major studies show, what they don't, and how they have been misunderstood and misrepresented. Hacsi shows how rarely educational policies are based on solid research evidence, and how programs that sound plausible simply do not satisfy the complex needs of real children.

The Blackboard and the Bottom Line

The Blackboard and the Bottom Line PDF Author: Larry Cuban
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"Ford Motor Company would not have survived the competition had it not been for an emphasis on results. We must view education the same way," the U.S. Secretary of Education declared in 2003. But is he right? In this provocative new book, Larry Cuban takes aim at the alluring cliché that schools should be more businesslike, and shows that in its long history in business-minded America, no one has shown that a business model can be successfully applied to education. In this straight-talking book, one of the most distinguished scholars in education charts the Gilded Age beginnings of the influential view that American schools should be organized to meet the needs of American businesses, and run according to principles of cost-efficiency, bottom-line thinking, and customer satisfaction. Not only are schools by their nature not businesslike, Cuban argues, but the attempt to run them along business lines leads to dangerous over-standardization--of tests, and of goals for our children. Why should we think that there is such a thing as one best school? Is "college for all" achievable--or even desirable? Even if it were possible, do we really want schools to operate as bootcamps for a workforce? Cuban suggests that the best business-inspired improvement for American education would be more consistent and sustained on-the-job worker training, tailored for the job to be done, and business leaders' encouragement--and adoption--of an ethic of civic engagement and public service.

Sick Schools

Sick Schools PDF Author: David V. Anderson
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532696884
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Who's afraid of for-profit education? Those who work in non-profit or government owned and operated schools. Many parents and other stakeholders have been made fearful by this education establishment. What's more important to humans: nutrition or education? Nutrition is more important because it is the prerequisite for other human activities, including education. What organizations provide food and who pays for the food? Food is provided by for-profit farmers, for-profit processors, for-profit wholesalers, and for-profit retailers. Most food is purchased with the consumers' own money, but a significant amount is purchased by low-income individuals using food stamps. Why can't education be provided similarly using education stamps? We trust for-profit enterprises to provide our food. Why can't we trust for-profit enterprises to provide K-12 education? Fearmongers have frightened us and made us into gullible compliant socialists who despise commercial activities in education. Go to the supermarket and ponder its marvelous array of foods and then contemplate how a for-profit K-12 education sector would please and amaze its customers.