The Public School Advantage

The Public School Advantage PDF Author: Christopher A. Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608907X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

The Public School Advantage

The Public School Advantage PDF Author: Christopher A. Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608907X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Oregon Blue Book

Oregon Blue Book PDF Author: Oregon. Office of the Secretary of State
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Oregon
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door PDF Author: Jack Schneider
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620978121
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
A trenchant analysis of how public education is being destroyed in overt and deceptive ways—and how to fight back In the “vigorous, well-informed” (Kirkus Reviews) A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the co-hosts of the popular education podcast Have You Heard expose the potent network of conservative elected officials, advocacy groups, funders, and think tanks that are pushing a radical vision to do away with public education. “Cut[ing] through the rhetorical fog surrounding a host of free-market reforms and innovations” (Mike Rose), Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire lay bare the dogma of privatization and reveal how it fits into the current context of right-wing political movements. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door “goes above and beyond the typical explanations” (SchoolPolicy.org), giving readers an up-close look at the policies—school vouchers, the war on teachers’ unions, tax credit scholarships, virtual schools, and more—driving the movement’s agenda. Called “well-researched, carefully argued, and alarming” by Library Journal, this smart, essential book has already incited a public reckoning on behalf of the millions of families served by the American educational system—and many more who stand to suffer from its unmaking. “Just as with good sci-fi,” according to Jacobin, “the authors make a compelling case that, based on our current trajectory, a nightmare future is closer than we think.”

Whose America?

Whose America? PDF Author: Jonathan Zimmerman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674045446
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
What do America's children learn about American history, American values, and human decency? Who decides? In this absorbing book, Jonathan Zimmerman tells the dramatic story of conflict, compromise, and more conflict over the teaching of history and morality in twentieth-century America. In history, whose stories are told, and how? As Zimmerman reveals, multiculturalism began long ago. Starting in the 1920s, various immigrant groups--the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, even the newly arrived Eastern European Jews--urged school systems and textbook publishers to include their stories in the teaching of American history. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s brought similar criticism of the white version of American history, and in the end, textbooks and curricula have offered a more inclusive account of American progress in freedom and justice. But moral and religious education, Zimmerman argues, will remain on much thornier ground. In battles over school prayer or sex education, each side argues from such deeply held beliefs that they rarely understand one another's reasoning, let alone find a middle ground for compromise. Here there have been no resolutions to calm the teaching of history. All the same, Zimmerman argues, the strong American tradition of pluralism has softened the edges of the most rigorous moral and religious absolutism.

Why Public Schools? Whose Public Schools?

Why Public Schools? Whose Public Schools? PDF Author: David Mathews
Publisher: NewSouth Books
ISBN: 1603062602
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
One of the most compelling issues in public education involves what it means for schools to be public. Are they public in funding or public in oversight and control? Are they public in the values they convey or in the standards they set? Are they public in deciding curriculum or only in access to space? David Matthews probes these issues in 19th century Alabama in ways that no one else has attempted. And he provides lessons from the past that can inform the present and future.

Can Public Schools Learn from Private Schools?

Can Public Schools Learn from Private Schools? PDF Author: Richard Rothstein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
This book examines case studies of eight public and eight private schools that investigated different identifiable and transferable private school practices that public schools could adopt to improve student outcomes. Data came from interviews with administrators, teachers, parents, and students from diverse schools. Chapter 1, "Accountability to Parents," discusses resistance to parents, structural limits to parent accountability, managing participation at parochial schools, lower-income parent participation, cases of formal accountability to parents, and observations about accountability to parents. Chapter 2, "Clarity of Goals and Expectations," discusses the religious character of parochial schools, broader educational goals versus testable outcomes, anchoring expectations in scripture, and clarity of goals. Chapter 3, "Behavioral and Value Objectives," discusses different approaches to discipline and the teaching of ethical and religious values in public and private schools. Chapter 4, "Clear Standards for Teacher Selection and Retention," includes faculty collegiality, hiring standards and teacher quality, formal and informal teacher evaluation, teacher retention and dismissal, and observations on selection and retention. Chapter 5, "Similarity of Curriculum Materials," discusses formal curricular similarities. Chapter 6 discusses "Competitive Improvements." Chapter 7, "Conclusions," suggests that similarities between public and private schools and the problems they face outweigh the differences. Differences are determined mainly by parent socioeconomic and cultural factors. Case study descriptions are appended. (Contains 17 references.) (SM)

Dumbing Us Down

Dumbing Us Down PDF Author: John Taylor Gatto
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 1550923013
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers’ bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto’s "guerrilla teaching." John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).

Public vs. Private

Public vs. Private PDF Author: Robert N. Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190644591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Americans today choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely lumped into categories of "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge in the first place, and what do they tell us about the more general relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? In Public vs. Private, Robert N. Gross describes how, more than a century ago, public policies fostered the rise of modern school choice. In the late nineteenth century, American Catholics began constructing rival, urban parochial school systems, an enormous and dramatic undertaking that challenged public school systems' near-monopoly of education. In a nation deeply committed to public education, mass attendance in Catholic schools produced immense conflict. States quickly sought ways to regulate this burgeoning private sector and the competition it produced, even attempting to abolish private education altogether in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished. The creation of the educational marketplace that we have inherited today--with systematic alternatives to public schools--was as much a product of public power as of private initiative. Gross also demonstrates that schools have been key sites in the development of the American legal conceptions of "public" and "private". Landmark Supreme Court cases about the state's role in regulating private schools, such as the 1819 Dartmouth v. Woodward decision, helped define and redefine the scope of government power over private enterprise. Judges and public officials gradually blurred the meaning of "public" and "private," contributing to the broader shift in how American governments have used private entities to accomplish public aims. As ever more policies today seek to unleash market forces in education, Americans would do well to learn from the historical relationship between government, markets, and schools.

Learning in Public

Learning in Public PDF Author: Courtney E. Martin
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316428256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for long walks, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began. Learning in Public is the story, not just Courtney’s journey, but a whole country’s. Many of us are newly awakened to the continuing racial injustice all around us, but unsure of how to go beyond hashtags and yard signs to be a part of transforming the country. Courtney discovers that her public school, the foundation of our fragile democracy, is a powerful place to dig deeper. Courtney E. Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other moms and dads as they navigate school choice. A vivid portrait of integration’s virtues and complexities, and yes, the palpable joy of trying to live differently in a country re-making itself. Learning in Public might also set your family’s life on a different course forever.

Schooling America

Schooling America PDF Author: Patricia Albjerg Graham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195315847
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In this informative volume, one of America's most esteemed historians of education offers a vibrant history of American education in the last century. Drawing on an array of sources, Graham offers an insightful look at what the public has sought from its educational institutions, what educators have delivered, and what remains to be done.