The Changing Urban School

Author : Andy Smarick
Publisher : R&L Education
ISBN 13 : 1607094789
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Urban School System of the Future written by Andy Smarick and published by R&L Education. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two generations, the traditional urban school system—the district—has utterly failed to do its job: prepare its students for a lifetime of success. Millions and millions of boys and girls have suffered the grievous consequences. The district is irreparably broken. For the sake of today’s and tomorrow’s inner-city kids, it must be replaced. The Urban School System of the Future argues that vastly better results can be realized through the creation of a new type of organization that properly manages a city’s portfolio of schools using the revolutionary principles of chartering. It will ensure that new schools are regularly created, that great schools are expanded and replicated, that persistently failing schools are closed, and that families have access to an array of high-quality options. This new entity will focus exclusively on school performance, meaning, among other things, our cities can thoughtfully integrate their traditional public, charter public, and private schools into a single, high-functioning k-12 system. For decades, the district has produced the most heartbreaking results for already at-risk kids. The Urban School System of the Future explains how we can finally turn the tide and create dynamic, responsive, high-performing, self-improving urban school systems that fulfill the promise of public education.

Author : Django Paris
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139499890
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language across Difference written by Django Paris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-28 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once a predominantly African-American city, South Vista opened the twenty-first century with a large Latino/a majority and a significant population of Pacific Islanders. Using an innovative blend of critical ethnography and social language methodologies, Paris offers the voices and experiences of South Vista youth as a window into how today's young people challenge and reinforce ethnic and linguistic difference in demographically changing urban schools and communities. The ways African-American language, Spanish and Samoan are used within and across ethnicity in social and academic interactions, text messages and youth-authored rap lyrics show urban young people enacting both new and old visions of pluralist cultural spaces. Paris illustrates how understanding youth communication, ethnicity and identities in changing urban landscapes like South Vista offers crucial avenues for researchers and educators to push for more equitable schools and a more equitable society.

Author : Charles M. Payne
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book So Much Reform, So Little Change written by Charles M. Payne and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This frank and courageous book explores the persistence of failure in today's urban schools. At its heart is the argument that most education policy discussions are disconnected from the daily realities of urban schools, especially those in poor and beleaguered neighborhoods. Charles M. Payne argues that we have failed to account fully for the weakness of the social infrastructure and the often dysfunctional organizational environments of urban schools and school systems. The result is that liberals and conservatives alike have spent a great deal of time pursuing questions of limited practical value in the effort to improve city schools. Payne carefully delineates these stubborn and intertwined sources of failure in urban school reform efforts of the past two decades. Yet while his book is unsparing in its exploration of the troubled recent history of urban school reform, Payne also describes himself as "guardedly optimistic." He describes how, in the last decade, we have developed real insights into the roots of school failure, and into how some individual schools manage to improve. He also examines recent progress in understanding how particular urban districts have established successful reforms on a larger scale. Drawing on a striking array of sources--from the recent history of various urban school systems, to the growing sophistication of education research, to his own experience as a teacher, scholar, and participant in reform efforts--Payne paints a vivid and unmistakably realistic portrait of urban schools and reforms of the past few decades. So Much Reform, So Little Change will be required reading for everyone interested in the plight--and the future--of urban schools.

Author : Clarence Nathan Stone
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Changing Urban Education written by Clarence Nathan Stone and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With critical issues like desegregation and funding facing our schools, dissatisfaction with public education has reached a new high. Teachers decry inadequate resources while critics claim educators are more concerned with job security than effective teaching. Though urban education has reached crisis proportions, contending players have difficulty agreeing on a common program of action. This book tells why. Changing Urban Education confronts the prevailing naivete in school reform by examining the factors that shape, reinforce, or undermine reform efforts. Edited by one of the nation's leading urban scholars, it examines forces for change and resistance in urban education and proposes that the barrier to reform can only be overcome by understanding how schools fit into the broader political contexts of their cities. Much of the problem with our schools lies with the reluctance of educators to recognize the profoundly political character of public education. The contributors show how urban political contexts vary widely with factors like racial composition, the role of the teachers' union, and relations between cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. Presenting case studies of original field research in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and six other urban areas, they consider how resistance to desegregation and the concentration of the poor in central urban areas affect education, and they suggest how cities can build support for reform through the involvement of business and other community players. By demonstrating the complex interrelationship between urban education and politics, this book shows schools to be not just places for educating children, but also major employers and large spenders of tax dollars. It also introduces the concept of civic capacity—the ability of educators and non-educators to work together on common goals—and suggests that this key issue must be addressed before education can be improved. Changing Urban Education makes it clear to educators that the outcome of reform efforts depends heavily on their political context as it reminds political scientists that education is a major part of the urban mix. While its prognosis is not entirely optimistic, it sets forth important guidelines that cannot be ignored if our schools are to successfully prepare children for the future.

Author : Robert Thornbury
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0415675693
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Changing Urban School written by Robert Thornbury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author takes a long look at what goes on in schools, and the roles played by people specifically concerned with them: but finally the problems of the school are seen as indissolubly bound up with the changes that have overtaken urban life. The school cannot be isolated, teachers, administrators, planners and parents must actively co-operate in making the school work in society and a society which works for the school. Nothing other than such a total vision, he concludes, will enable us to achieve normal educational goals. Robert Thornbury writes out of fifteen years experience of the urban school and of the problems not only of Britain but also those sometime similar, often more acute, of other countries, in particular the United States and Australia. The need for a total urban strategy is worldwide. His point of view is broad-based but his sympathies lie most of all with the hard-working teacher who stayed on in the urban classroom. It is a book for teachers therefore, but also, by its own argument, for all concerned with the future of the inner-city and the reordering of education.

Author : Betty Achinstein
Publisher : Teachers College Press
ISBN 13 : 0807752185
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Change(d) Agents written by Betty Achinstein and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2011-06-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines both the promise and complexity of diversifying today's teaching profession. Drawing from a 5-year study of 21 new teachers of colour working in urban, hard-to-staff schools, this book uncovers a systemic paradox that the teachers confront. They are committed to improving educational opportunities for students of colour by acting as role models, culturally/linguistically responsive teachers, and change agents. The teaching profession encouraged such commitments and some teachers acted with support from individual, organizational, and community-based sponsors. However, many of these new teachers work in schools that are culturally subtractive and have restrictive accountability policies that challenge their ability to perform cultural/professional roles to which they are committed. Many teachers internalize the contradiction, resulting in their becoming changed agents within the educational system they sought to change. This book is essential reading for educators, leaders, and policymakers.

Author : Linn Posey-Maddox
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022612035X
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools written by Linn Posey-Maddox and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades a growing number of middle-class parents have considered sending their children to—and often end up becoming active in—urban public schools. Their presence can bring long-needed material resources to such schools, but, as Linn Posey-Maddox shows in this study, it can also introduce new class and race tensions, and even exacerbate inequalities. Sensitively navigating the pros and cons of middle-class transformation, When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools asks whether it is possible for our urban public schools to have both financial security and equitable diversity. Drawing on in-depth research at an urban elementary school, Posey-Maddox examines parents’ efforts to support the school through their outreach, marketing, and volunteerism. She shows that when middle-class parents engage in urban school communities, they can bring a host of positive benefits, including new educational opportunities and greater diversity. But their involvement can also unintentionally marginalize less-affluent parents and diminish low-income students’ access to the improving schools. In response, Posey-Maddox argues that school reform efforts, which usually equate improvement with rising test scores and increased enrollment, need to have more equity-focused policies in place to ensure that low-income families also benefit from—and participate in—school change.

Author : Simon Pratt-Adams
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1847060242
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Changing Urban Education written by Simon Pratt-Adams and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the debate surrounding teaching and learning in urban settings in contemporary Britain, and the impact this has on education. >

Author : Joseph W. Check
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313012814
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Politics, Language, and Culture written by Joseph W. Check and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-10-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics, language, and culture are three of the most powerful forces affecting education today, yet they have been little discussed in relation to systemic school reform, the new status quo of urban schools. This book looks at their effects through the eyes of teachers, administrators, and insider/outsiders who are actually living reform at the school level in four widely different urban school systems: Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland, California, and Boston. The book also creates a statistical and conceptual picture of urban education and school reform as national phenomena with deep historical roots, and offers a composite case study of an urban elementary school undergoing reform. The author argues that urban school reform is failing becasue its basic strategy is misguided and because reform thinking has consciously ignored three essential sources of knowledge about school change. Strategically, efforts for reform have relied heavily on the widespread replication of nationally promoted exemplary programs. This approach assumes that local schools lack the knowledge and will to solve their own problems and require prescriptive intervention from national models. In fact, the exemplary programs approach has yielded very limited success. What is needed instead is the creation and long-term support of unique, local exemplary contexts that combine best-practice approaches with local knowledge, conditions, and resources.

Author : Robert Thornbury
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136669124
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Changing Urban School written by Robert Thornbury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author takes a long look at what goes on in schools, and the roles played by people specifically concerned with them: but finally the problems of the school are seen as indissolubly bound up with the changes that have overtaken urban life. The school cannot be isolated, teachers, administrators, planners and parents must actively co-operate in making the school work in society and a society which works for the school. Nothing other than such a total vision, he concludes, will enable us to achieve normal educational goals. Robert Thornbury writes out of fifteen years experience of the urban school and of the problems not only of Britain but also those sometime similar, often more acute, of other countries, in particular the United States and Australia. The need for a total urban strategy is worldwide. His point of view is broad-based but his sympathies lie most of all with the hard-working teacher who stayed on in the urban classroom. It is a book for teachers therefore, but also, by its own argument, for all concerned with the future of the inner-city and the reordering of education.