What's Wrong with Our Schools

What's Wrong with Our Schools PDF Author: Michael C. Zwaagstra
Publisher: R&L Education
ISBN: 1607091593
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book

Book Description
What's Wrong with Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them examines the status of public education in North America and exposes many of the absurd instructional practices found in all-too-many schools. Written by three experienced educators, this book provides readers with a direct window into public education. The language is straightforward, the case studies based on real events, and the research evidence clearly presented. With chapter titles like, 'Subject Matter Matters,' 'A Pass Should be Earned,' and 'There is Too Much Edu-Babble,' the authors systematically demolish the ridiculous fads that have taken hold of public education. As unashamed apologists for the importance of knowledge and content in school curricula, the authors clearly show why the views of romantic progressives, like those of popular author Alfie Kohn, fail to stand up to rigorous scrutiny. A consistent focus on common sense permeates this book and provides parents, teachers, and administrators with practical ways in which they can help improve public education. Anyone interested in the future of public education will benefit from reading this book. For more information, visit www.fixingourschools.com.

What's Wrong with Our Schools

What's Wrong with Our Schools PDF Author: Michael C. Zwaagstra
Publisher: R&L Education
ISBN: 1607091593
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book

Book Description
What's Wrong with Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them examines the status of public education in North America and exposes many of the absurd instructional practices found in all-too-many schools. Written by three experienced educators, this book provides readers with a direct window into public education. The language is straightforward, the case studies based on real events, and the research evidence clearly presented. With chapter titles like, 'Subject Matter Matters,' 'A Pass Should be Earned,' and 'There is Too Much Edu-Babble,' the authors systematically demolish the ridiculous fads that have taken hold of public education. As unashamed apologists for the importance of knowledge and content in school curricula, the authors clearly show why the views of romantic progressives, like those of popular author Alfie Kohn, fail to stand up to rigorous scrutiny. A consistent focus on common sense permeates this book and provides parents, teachers, and administrators with practical ways in which they can help improve public education. Anyone interested in the future of public education will benefit from reading this book. For more information, visit www.fixingourschools.com.

Saving Our Schools

Saving Our Schools PDF Author: Kenneth S. Goodman
Publisher: RDR Books
ISBN: 9781571431028
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
"Saving Our Schools exposes the ugly side of President George Bush's "No Child Left Behind" mandate, which has threatened to close more than 6,000 public schools, to the detriment of dedicated teachers and disadvantaged children alike. Revealing how NCLB forces schools with strictly limited resources to teach its children test-taking skills in a desperate bid to pass high-stakes standardized testing, and how the government blacklists successful professors, institutions, and methods that balk the NCLB party line, and much more, Saving Our Schools warns of an immediate threat to the integrity of public education and urges the reader to take action. An eye-opening social commentary, of keen importance in determining the nation's future. -Midwest Book Review

Class Struggle

Class Struggle PDF Author: Jay Mathews
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Current Events
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book

Book Description
Using Mamaroneck High School in Westchester County, New York, as his primary case study, Mathews examines the realities of the top public high schools in the United States. He offers "a penetrating view of the competing -- and often damaging -- forces that nurture the Ivy League goals of the academic and economic elite while often squashing the less glamorous ambitions of the rest."--Jacket.

Wasting Minds

Wasting Minds PDF Author: Ronald A. Wolk
Publisher: ASCD
ISBN: 1416611312
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book

Book Description
This book offers a smart and tightly reasoned critique of the educational status quo.

Waiting for a Miracle

Waiting for a Miracle PDF Author: James P. Comer
Publisher: Plume Books
ISBN: 9780452276468
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
It is the thesis of this provocative book that the deteriorating state of America's public school system is actually a reflection of the problems in our culture and society. In "Waiting For A Miracle," James P. Comer M.D., Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center and the author of Maggie's American Dream, and co-author of Raising Black Children, outlines the cause of these afflictions and presents an inspiring paradigm for a new way of thinking and acting with regard to children and family.At the root of the problem, he states, is a social failure to make a commitment to families, and to community and child development.Using many examples from his personal experience of growing up poor, and from more than thirty years of community involvement, Comer argues that schools can be the most important instrument of change in a society. He spells out how private, public and non-profit sectors can collaborate to enable children, families, and communities to survive and thrive.

Failing Our Kids

Failing Our Kids PDF Author: Charles Ungerleider
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 9780771086823
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book

Book Description
Our public schools are in danger of collapse, and if they do, we will all pay the price Healthy public schools are essential for a healthy economy and creating informed citizens. But we are neglecting our schools in a perversely malicious way: making impossible demands on them, strangling them financially, creating trivial changes for the sake of ideology, avoiding necessary changes, and just plain ignoring them. In this forcefully argued and convincing book, education expert Charles Ungerleider makes our situation plain. Canadians have never placed a higher value on education, but if we do not do something about public schools now, we may lose the benefits that they provide and miss the opportunity to fix them. Drawing on the latest research and using examples from across the country, Ungerleider describes what’s right and what’s wrong about our public schools system and provides solutions for making them a lot better. He looks at the conflict between “traditional” and “progressive” approaches to education. He argues that the public school curriculum has become bloated, fragmented, and mired in trivia. He examines the effects of the changing family and the influence on children of television, the Internet, video games, and their peers. He discusses the work of teachers and teachers’ unions, the changes in public school finance and governance, and the issue of accountability. And he takes on the issue of school choice and competition, where, more than anywhere else, rhetoric prevails over reason.

Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools?

Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? PDF Author: Mary Kathleen Emery
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
Where exactly did high-stakes testing come from anyway? Neither parents, teachers, administrators, nor school boards demanded it, and now many communities feel powerless to reverse its appalling effect on our schools. Hot on the heels of the testing masterminds and peeling back layer upon layer of documentation, Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian found a familiar scent at the end of the paper trail. Corporate money. CEOs and American big business have blanketed United States public education officials with their influence and, as Emery and Ohanian prove, their fifteen year drive to undemocratize public education has yielded a many-tentacled private-public monster. With stunning clarity and meticulous research, Emery and Ohanian take you on a tour of board rooms, rightist think tanks, nonprofit concerned citizens groups, and governmental agencies to expose the real story of how current education reform arose, how its deceptive rhetoric belies its goals, and the true nature of its polarizing and disenfranchising mission. Why is corporate America bashing our schools? Because it's in their interestsnot yours. What can you do to promote your best educational interests? Read this expose and get ready to dismantle the education-reform machine.

Reign of Error

Reign of Error PDF Author: Diane Ravitch
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345806352
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book

Book Description
From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, an incisive, comprehensive look at today’s American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools. In a chapter-by-chapter breakdown she puts forth a plan for what can be done to preserve and improve our public schools. She makes clear what is right about U.S. education, how policy makers are failing to address the root causes of educational failure, and how we can fix it.

The Schools Our Children Deserve

The Schools Our Children Deserve PDF Author: Alfie Kohn
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618083459
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
Arguing against the tougher standards rhetoric that marks the current education debate, the author of No Contest and Punished by Rewards writes that such tactics squeeze the pleasure out of learning. Reprint.

How Schools Really Matter

How Schools Really Matter PDF Author: Douglas B. Downey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673336X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book

Book Description
Most of us assume that public schools in America are unequal—that the quality of the education varies with the location of the school and that as a result, children learn more in the schools that serve mostly rich, white kids than in the schools serving mostly poor, black kids. But it turns out that this common assumption is misplaced. As Douglas B. Downey shows in How Schools Really Matter, achievement gaps have very little to do with what goes on in our schools. Not only do schools not exacerbate inequality in skills, they actually help to level the playing field. The real sources of achievement gaps are elsewhere. A close look at the testing data in seasonal patterns bears this out. It turns out that achievement gaps in reading skills between high- and low-income children are nearly entirely formed prior to kindergarten, and schools do more to reduce them than increase them. And when gaps do increase, they tend to do so during summers, not during school periods. So why do both liberal and conservative politicians strongly advocate for school reform, arguing that the poor quality of schools serving disadvantaged children is an important contributor to inequality? It’s because discussing the broader social and economic reforms necessary for really reducing inequality has become too challenging and polarizing—it’s just easier to talk about fixing schools. Of course, there are differences that schools can make, and Downey outlines the kinds of reforms that make sense given what we know about inequality outside of schools, including more school exposure, increased standardization, and better and fairer school and teacher measurements. ? How Schools Really Matter offers a firm rebuke to those who find nothing but fault in our schools, which are doing a much better than job than we give them credit for. It should also be a call to arms for educators and policymakers: the bottom line is that if we are serious about reducing inequality, we are going to have to fight some battles that are bigger than school reform—battles against the social inequality that is reflected within, rather than generated by—our public school system.