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.   

This volume shows how school districts can and do make essential contributions to the renewal and enhancement of American education. It expands the conversation on what school districts are, what they do, and how they can enhance the quality of teaching and learning in US schools. (view table of contents)

Product Description: A comprehensive look at inner-city youth programs. Urban Sanctuaries analyzes the strategies of community leaders and organizations. The author describes how these leaders create and sustain youth programs in spite of enormous challenges. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This text offers a contemporary focus on staff development, taking a fresh look at practice and policy on the basis of the most recent developments on teacher learning. The contributors, along with editors Milbrey W. McLaughlin and Ida Oberman, draw on insights of both practitioner researchers and academics. Individual chapters examine the challenges and nature of professional development by exploring specific contexts, such as those involving school/university partnerships, secondary/higher education, collaborations, and inner-city settings. Taken together, the chapters represent a research agenda for framing professional development in the multi-faceted contexts of teachers' daily practice. The book closes with a critical examination of what needs to happen in the policy enviornment for the new professional development practices to become widely implemented. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Combining humanism and social science, the authors illustrate how youth organisations enable the young to link a sense of self beyond the mere labels of ethnicity and gender, to responsibility and supportive environments for work and play.

Product Description: Research on teacher effectiveness has focused on a variety of areas over the years. This book argues that, in addition to any other factors, effective teaching depends significantly on the context of teaching and the conditions of the workplace...read more