Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation’s largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge—launched in 1994—alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless.               McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hope—that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better.   

Product Description: Since the publication of the first edition, the use of protocols has spread from conferences and workshops to everyday school and university settings. Responding to educators' ongoing needs, this new edition features seven completely new protocols...read more

Product Description: In the early decades of the 20th century, Grenville L. Winthrop, a New Yorker and Harvard graduate, assembled a remarkable collection of paintings and drawings by French, British and American artists of the 19th century. They include the finest group of works by Ingres outside France and major canvasses and sheets by David, Gericault, Delacroix, Moreau and Renoir...read more

Product Description: This is the story of how four large reform organizations in the USA came together to form a partnership known as ATLAS (Authentic Teaching, Learning, and Assessment). It provides a glimpse into the individual workings of these organizations and how they uncovered the craft of school reform...read more

Product Description: This is the story of how four large reform organizations in the USA came together to form a partnership known as ATLAS (Authentic Teaching, Learning, and Assessment). It provides a glimpse into the individual workings of these organizations and how they uncovered the craft of school reform...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Introduces the method of evaluating student achievement where students present evidence of their skills in various areas including critical thinking and communication.

Product Description: An analysis of teaching in which the author examines the classroom environment, the conceptual domains of research, the complex layers of public policy, and the language of educational discourse and polemic. He looks at what teachers do, how they learn, and how they cope.