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Soon after enrolling her older son in a Boston public elementary school, Susan Naimark began to see that opportunities offered to her kids were often unavailable to their classmates of color. In The Education of a White Parent Naimark candidly describes her sometimes faltering efforts to create change in the school system, tracing what turns out to be the gradual transformation of a dismayed parent into a parent leader, school board member, and advocate for equal opportunities for all students. She acknowledges that the problem of racial privilege is overwhelmingly complex and freighted with awkwardness and frustration, but she asserts with humble confidence that it is not intractable. Alongside compelling stories about her experiences, Naimark discusses numerous national studies, identifying the pattern of inequities in public schools and some signs of progress. In a clear, conversational tone, Naimark shares what she has learned about navigating school bureaucracies, collaborating across race, and achieving results that benefit all kids.
Today's students need to be fully prepared for successful learning and living in the information age. This book provides a practical, flexible framework for designing Guided Inquiry that helps achieve that goal. Guided Inquiry prepares today's learners for an uncertain future by providing the education that enables them to make meaning of myriad sources of information in a rapidly evolving world. The companion book, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, explains what Guided Inquiry is and why it is now essential now. This book, Guided Inquiry Design: A Framework for Inquiry in Your School, explains how to do it. The first three chapters provide an overview of the Guided Inquiry design framework, identify the eight phases of the Guided Inquiry process, summarize the research that grounds Guided Inquiry, and describe the five tools of inquiry that are essential to implementation. The following chapters detail the eight phases in the Guided Inquiry design process, providing examples at all levels from pre-K through 12th grade and concluding with recommendations for building Guided Inquiry in your school. The book is for pre-K–12 teachers, school librarians, and principals who are interested in and actively designing an inquiry approach to curricular learning that incorporates a wide range of resources from the library, the Internet, and the community. Staff of community resources, museum educators, and public librarians will also find the book useful for achieving student learning goals.
The future of smart cities has arrived, courtesy of citizens and their phones. To prove it, Daniel T. O’Brien explains the transformative insights gleaned from years researching Boston’s 311 reporting system, a sophisticated city management tool that has revolutionized how ordinary Bostonians use and maintain public spaces. Through its phone service, mobile app, website, and Twitter account, 311 catalogues complaints about potholes, broken street lights, graffiti, litter, vandalism, and other issues that are no one citizen’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life. The Urban Commons offers a pioneering model of what modern digital data and technology can do for cities like Boston that seek both prosperous growth and sustainability. Analyzing a rich trove of data, O’Brien discovers why certain neighborhoods embrace the idea of custodianship and willingly invest their time to monitor the city’s common environments and infrastructure. On the government’s side of the equation, he identifies best practices for implementing civic technologies that engage citizens, for deploying public services in collaborative ways, and for utilizing the data generated by these efforts. Boston’s 311 system has narrowed the gap between residents and their communities, and between constituents and local leaders. The result, O’Brien shows, has been the creation of more effective policy and practices that reinvigorate the way citizens and city governments approach their mutual interests. By unpacking when, why, and how the 311 system has worked for Boston, The Urban Commons reveals the power and potential of this innovative system, and the lessons learned that other cities can adapt.
When sixth-grade mathematical genius Charlie Lewis is recruited to recover moon rocks taken from NASA's vaults, the Whiz Kids enter a paper airplane contest hosted by the suspect's company in this follow-up to Bringing Down the Mouse. 5 1/2 x 8 5/16.
In recent years, federal mandates in education have become the subject of increasing debate. Adam R. Nelson's The Elusive Ideal—a postwar history of federal involvement in the Boston public schools—provides lessons from the past that shed light on the continuing struggles of urban public schools today. This far-reaching analysis examines the persistent failure of educational policy at local, state, and federal levels to equalize educational opportunity for all. Exploring deep-seated tensions between the educational ideals of integration, inclusion, and academic achievement over time, Nelson considers the development and implementation of policies targeted at diverse groups of urban students, including policies related to racial desegregation, bilingual education, special education, school funding, and standardized testing. An ambitious study that spans more than thirty years and covers all facets of educational policy, from legal battles to tax strategies, The Elusive Ideal provides a model from which future inquiries will proceed. A probing and provocative work of urban history with deep relevance for urban public schools today, Nelson's book reveals why equal educational opportunity remains such an elusive ideal.
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.
A Decade of Urban School Reform looks at this critical era in the Boston schools and distills valuable insights and lessons for school leaders and reformers everywhere. In the last decade, the Boston Public Schools has undergone critical reforms that have been of intense interest to school leaders and policymakers throughout the country. Under the leadership of superintendent Thomas Payzant, the Boston schools implemented extensive reform strategies that yielded notable results. Fittingly, at the end of Payzant's superintendency in September 2006, the Boston Public Schools received the Broad Prize for Urban Education for being the most improved urban school district in the country. With chapters that explore questions pertaining to governance, human resources, instruction, data collection, disabilities, community engagement, and other topics, the book offers a detailed, comprehensive portrait of a school system managing the complex and daunting tasks of system-wide reform. The result is a timely, in-depth contribution to the small group of indispensable writings on urban school reform.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities." "An epic of American city life...a story of such hypnotic specificity that we re-experience all the shades of hope and anger, pity and fear that living anywhere in late 20th-century America has inevitably provoked." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times