School Reform from the Inside Out


Book Description

This is essential reading for any school leader, education reformer, policymaker, or citizen interested in the forces that promote school change. "Giving test results to an incoherent, badly run school doesn't automatically make it a better school. The work of turning a school around entails improving the knowledge and skills of teachers-changing their knowledge of content and how to teach it-and helping them to understand where their students are in their academic development. Low-performing schools, and the people who work in them, don't know what to do. If they did, they would be doing it already." So writes Richard Elmore in "Unwarranted Intrusion," an essay critiquing the accountability mandates and high-stakes testing policies of the No Child Left Behind Act. In School Reform from the Inside Out, one of the country's leading experts on the successes and failures of American education policy tackles issues ranging from teacher development to testing to "failing" schools. As Elmore aptly notes, successful school reform begins "from the inside out" with teachers, administrators, and school staff, not with external mandates or standards.




The Systems Thinking School


Book Description

This book examines the school as an operational organization through the lens of systems thinking. In this way it serves as an invitation to look again at schools and how they operate as learning systems. It begins by showing exactly why our inherited, industrial school model, can never be made to work effectively no matter how hard school leaders try or how well schools are judged. This book uses systems thinking to explain and describe the management unlearning and new learning needed to create deep and fundamental changes to the way schools operate as complete learning entities. It explains why the reinstatement of the personal tutor in a vertical system is essential to the creation of a learning organization within a complete home/school operational learning process; one capable of building a values driven and more purposeful school culture within a more relevant and coherent society.




Tinkering toward Utopia


Book Description

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.




Grading from the Inside Out


Book Description

The time for grading reform is now. While the transition to standards-based practices may be challenging, it is essential for effective instruction and assessment. In this practical guide, the author outlines specific steps your team can take to transform grading and reporting schoolwide. Each chapter includes examples of grading dilemmas, vignettes from teachers and administrators, and ideas for bringing parents on board with change.




From the Inside-Out


Book Description

If we want our students to be prepared for a life involved with artificial intelligence, global awareness, cultural understanding, racial, religious and lifestyle diversity, and changing economic and political realities, then we have to change what we are doing in our schools from pre-school to graduate school. We can no longer wait for large-scale reforms to develop, because those reforms will only occur due to some kind of tragedy. If schools are going to reform proactively, educators in each school and in each district have to lead the way.




Changing Schools from the Inside Out


Book Description

At any time, public schools labor under great economic, political, and social pressures that make it difficult to create large-scale, 'whole school' change. But current top-down mandates require that schools close achievement gaps while teaching more problem solving, inquiry, and research skills_with fewer resources. Failure to meet test-based standards can produce consequences such as school closure or staff replacement. With this real-world challenge to education foremost, this book presents pertinent research and instructive case studies of two 'good' high schools. It advocates a proven strategy of small-scale, incremental change_small wins_which increases the likelihood that schools will improve despite a climate of 'do more with less.' Chapters describe the current societal context; the history of major change projects since the 1970s; the organizational and social characteristics of schools and classrooms; human factors that encourage and support improvement; the effects of technology; forces affecting teachers and principals; commonplace components of and vehicles for change; and practical 'levers and footings' for change that can have a high positive payoff.




Leading from the Inside Out


Book Description

This book proposes that the collective responsibility of teachers as classroom and school leaders working together to solve their own problems provides the fulcrum of school change. It makes the case that teachers and school leaders do not operate in a vacuum, but rather, they work within the larger context of policy and other social influences. Grubb and Tredway provide the building blocks of history, policy, and social analysis that are necessary if teachers are to be effective in the collective school a place where adults thrive as learners and are able to co-create joyful learning experiences for children and youth. By encouraging teachers to move out of the individual classroom and to think critically and institutionally about the schools they would like to work in, about their own responsibilities for creating such schools, about the range of policies from outside the school and how they can influence those policies rather than being subjected to them this book shows that a teacher s influence is not limited to the classroom and students, but can significantly shape and inform external policies and decisions."




Neoliberalism and Education Reform


Book Description

This book has two primary goals: a critique of educational reforms that result from the rise of neoliberalism and to provide alternatives to neoliberal conceptions of education problems and solutions. A key issue addressed by contributors is how forms of critical consciousness can be engendered thought society via schools, that is, paying attention to the practical aspects of pedagogy for social transformation and organizing to achieve a most just society.




Inside Teaching


Book Description

Reform the schools, improve teaching: these battle cries of American education have been echoing for twenty years. So why does teaching change so little? Arguing that too many would-be reformers know nothing about the conflicting demands of teaching, Mary Kennedy takes us into the controlled commotion of the classroom, revealing how painstakingly teachers plan their lessons, and how many different ways things go awry. Teachers try simultaneously to keep track of materials, time, students, and ideas. In their effort to hold all of these things together, they can inadvertently quash students' enthusiasm and miss valuable teachable moments. Kennedy argues that pedagogical reform proposals that do not acknowledge all of the things teachers need to do are bound to fail. If reformers want students to learn, they must address all of the problems teachers face, not just those that interest them.




What I Learned In School


Book Description

From the Winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2007 "In the world of education reform, where silver-bullet ideas, ideologies, and intellectual fashion clamor for influence, James Comer's thinking has long been a sea of calm, balanced, and humane wisdom focused on the needs of the whole person. Reading Comer you see the incompleteness of so many other approaches to reform, as well as learn an integrated approach to making schools work. And now, here it all is in a single book. If you want to see how schools can actually work, as opposed to affiliate with a prior belief about how they should work, this is a must read." —Claude Steele,professor, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University "The best introduction?professional and personal—to the remarkable world of James Comer: physician-educator, par excellence." —Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts "James Comer is a rare constellation among social scientists: a great intellect, a keen analyst, a creative problem-solver and a man of enormous empathy. His writings are required reading for anyone interested in education reform or improving the odds for poor children." —Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO, Harlem Children's Zone