Is it possible to fundamentally improve the daily workings of the urban classroom in less than seven years? According to John Simmons, it will take a revolution in the way that leaders of urban school systems think and operate, from the classroom to the boardroom. In this ambitious volume, Simmons and a stellar group of contributors, including Linda Darling-Hammond, Richard Elmore, Michael Fullan, Charlotte Danielson, Susan Moore Johnson, Adam Urbanski, Alan Odden, and Valerie Lee, bring the best current research to bear on a range of critical topics, creating a practical framework that superintendents and their teams can use to transform their big-city school systems into true learning communities. As it integrates many voices into a larger vision, this book: demonstrates convincingly how current, cutting-edge thinking about system change in business has been used to successfully transform schools and close the achievement gap among diverse students; provides an overview and assessment of the reform efforts of current large-district superintendents, including Alan Bersin, Tom Payzant, Arne Duncan, and Kaye Stripling; directs the reader towards a larger understanding of issues and priorities with three principles and four key strategies; applies current research to illuminate what has succeeded and what has not worked in cities such as Boston, San Diego, Houston, and especially Chicago; and, features the perspectives and experiences of notable experts who have been working in the trenches of school reform for decades.

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust.Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want.In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment.Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created. (view table of contents)

Education reformers Deborah Meier, Theodore Sizer, and Nancy Sizer have published books that are acknowledged classics of education writing—books that have literally helped shape a movement centered on small schools, community, and alternative visions of teaching and learning.But as school principals, all three have also done another kind of writing, as well. Every week as principles they wrote short essays in their schools' newsletters to families. Sharp and accessible but intellectually ambitious, these little essays talk about everything from homework to discipline, from academic expectations to reading for pleasure. Keeping School collects the best of these gems from the two schools the authors have most recently run: an urban public elementary school in Boston, and an exurban charter secondary school thirty miles west in Devens, Massachusetts. There could be no better portrait of the kind of small school that Meier and the Sizers advocate—and the values behind them—than these elegant, thoughtful, intimate letters. They are organized around the themes of Authority, Community, Learning, and Standards, and the writers, who have been friends and colleagues for years, frame them with new essays on those larger topics.Reflecting decades of practical wisdom, this collection is a portrait of a different way of "keeping school" and an essential companion to books like Ted Sizer's Horace's Compromise, Ted and Nancy Sizer's The Students Are Watching, and Meier's The Power of Their Ideas.

Product Description: Signed into law in 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) promised to revolutionize American public education. Originally supported by a bipartisan coalition, it purports to improve public schools by enforcing a system of standards and accountability through high-stakes testing...read more

A citizen's guide to the 'No Child Left Behind' Act of 2002 argues that the bill changed education for the worse by imposing unrealistic standards for testing and harsh sanctions against schools that do not comply. Original.

Product Description: The late Theodore Sizer's vision for a truly democratic public high school system Our current high schools are ill-designed and inefficient. We have inherited a program of studies that in its overall structure has not changed in over a century...read more

An innovative educator and leader of one of the most remarkable schools in the U.S.--Central Park East--offers her ideas for public education (view table of contents)

Product Description: How do teachers and schools create meaningful learning experiences for students with diverse skills, abilities, and cultures? How can teachers authentically assess the learning of their students and build on their strengths and interests in ways that enrich the larger community? How can schools be turned into places where everyone is learning from each other? These are the big questions that guide the work of teachers at the well-known Mission Hill School in Boston and that are addressed in this book...read more