The Faculty Lounges


Book Description

College tuition has risen four times faster than the rate of inflation in the past two decades. While faculties like to blame the rising costs on fancy athletic buildings and bloated administrations, professors are hardly getting the short end of the stick. Spending on instruction has increased twenty-two percent over the past decade at private research universities. Parents and taxpayers shouldn't get overheated about faculty salaries: tenure is where they should concentrate their anger. The jobs-for-life entitlement that comes with an ivory tower position is at the heart of so many problems with higher education today. Veteran journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, an alumna of one of the country's most expensive and best-endowed schools, explores how tenure has promoted a class system in higher education, leaving contingent faculty who are barely making minimum wage and have no time for students to teach large swaths of the undergraduate population. She shows how the institution of tenure forces junior professors to keep their mouths shut for a decade or more if they disagree with senior faculty about anything from politics to research methods. Lastly, she examines how the institution of tenure—with the job security, mediocre salaries, and low levels of accountability it entails—may be attracting the least innovative and interesting members of our society into teaching.










Silenced Voices and Extraordinary Conversations


Book Description

Two noted educators invite new and veteran teachers on an intellectual guided tour through the troubles of bad practice and the delights of good. This volume is a collection of classic essays, as urgently needed now as when they first appeared, on social class, race, gender, and schooling crafted over the course of two decades. The authors invite all of us to take a serious look at the paradox of public education, the ways in which urban schools reproduce social inequalities while, at the same time, serve as sites for learning at its most transformative and compelling. A must-read for all those educators who believe that we can no longer afford to cede this space to policymakers who know little of the life of a classroom, the curiosity of a child, and the moral imperatives of teaching for critical citizenship.




Race, Class, and Power in School Restructuring


Book Description

Winner of the 1998 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Titles This book challenges common assumptions about the efficacy of teacher collaboration, empowerment, and professional development to improve the educational experiences of low-achieving African American students without engaging the political and ideological contexts in which reforms take place. Written in a clear, engaging style, the book tells the story of two restructuring junior high schools in a single district, and how teachers' ideologies and race, class, and power contradictions in the schools, school district, and city shaped outcomes. Although the book is a critique of restructuring, powerful portraits of teachers who create culturally responsive and empowering educational experiences demonstrate the potential to reform educational practices and policies for African American students and suggest a direction for transforming schools.




Using Mixed Methods to Study Intersectionality in Higher Education


Book Description

This volume offers institutional researchers several examples of the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methods can be integrated for a better grasp of how members of our educational communities understand and experience their environments on the basis of their multiple identities. The first two chapters provide context for the volume's theme with definitions and overview of the underpinnings of mixted methodology. Subsequent chapters illustrate the multiple ways in which qualitative and quantitative methods can be integrated to understand the complexity of identity and experiences of marginalized groups in the academy. Other chapters focus on students' experiences and demonstrate how mixed-methodology approaches were used to explore college access among first-generation Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders analyze racial ideology of white males with interview data driving analysis of longitudinal dataset and research and accessment generating accurate understanding how of race and gender shape students' experiences within the campus The final chapter presents findings of a mixed-methods inquiry to challenge current conceptions about racial categorization and practices for gathering institutional data on students' identity. Volume editors Kimberly A Griffin, assistant professor of education policy studies at the Pennsylvania State University, and Samuel D. Museus, assistant professor of educational administration at University of Hawai?i Manoa, and contributing authors advocate for intersectionality research and argue that it holds great promise for advancing knowledge in higher education. Their book is ideal for institutions and institutional researchers who want to understand and most effectively serve their students and faculty. This is the 151st volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Institutional Research. Always timely and comprehensive, New Directions for Institutional Research provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.




Working Class Without Work


Book Description

The author wxplores issues of race, class, and gender among white working class youths, and she considers the roles of school and family in the production of the self. The book also examines the working class teens' attitudes toward and readiness for postfeminist thinking and the emerging American New Right. Presenting the first sustained ethnographic investigation of white working class youth in the context of deindustrializatin, Weis offers a complex portrait of how these young people produce themselves in a society vastly different from that of their parents and grandparents.




Jocks and Burnouts


Book Description

This ethnographic study of adolescent social structure in a Michigan high school shows how the school's institutional environment fosters the formation of opposed class cultures in the student population, which in turn serve as a social tracking system.




Rekindling the Flame


Book Description

This book offers a research-based, practical approach to recognizing, managing, and preventing teacher burnout. It provides a description of the origins and symptoms of burnout and a personality profile of teachers who are most susceptible to burnout. Organizational issues and administrative roles that contribute to burnout are identified, along with suggestions for improvement. There are eight chapters in two parts. Part 1, "The Burnout Syndrome," includes (1) "When the Flame Flickers: Recognizing Burnout," (2) "Flame Extinguishers: Sources of Burnout," and (3) "Smoldering Embers: The Cost of Burnout." Part 2, "Recovery and Prevention," includes (4) "Igniting the Flames: Revitalization Strategies," (5) "Guardian of the Flame: The Principal's Role," (6) "Tending the Flames: Supervision," (7) "Fuel for the Flame: Staff Development as Prevention," and (8) "Stoking the Fire: Improving the Workplace." (Contains 99 references.) (SM)