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Explores the intersection of two central issues in American education today: school reform through restructuring and alienation from school of many children of color. A tough look at the impact of teachers' and administrators' beliefs and practices.
Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.
Structured schools, free schools, graded schools, ungraded schools, no schools at all—the conflicts over public education in America rage on, for contemporary schools have not lived up to our expectations. The essence of the criticism reflected in the essays in this volume is that America's dual educational goals—free inquiry and social mobility-are not being met. Instead of producing enlightened citizens capable of high social and economic mobility, our schools have become warehouses of children stored as commodities, docile and immobile.
Focusing on the influence of the business community on schools, this book describes how popular business management theories and production processes have been imported into schools during periods of societal upheaval in order to create a sense of order and efficiency while meeting the objective of producing a workforce that meets the specifications set down by employers. Unlike other books that say why schools need to be reformed or how that reform should proceed, this study takes a critical look at the latest call to restructure schools in light of the economic, social, and political forces that affect the education establishment and the children of our nation.
In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.
The editors of this volume aim to help educators make better decisions about their efforts at restructuring by showing what has and has not worked in some of the most widely known experiments. Because the programmes examined have been in place for several years, the cases offer richness of detail and a wealth of ideas. This book's insights and practical detail will benefit educators both in schools and at district level, as well as students and academics in the field.
During the 1980s, widespread dissatisfaction with America's schools gave rise to a powerful movement for educational change, and the nation's political institutions responded with aggressive reforms. Chubb and Moe argue that these reforms are destined to fail because they do not get to the root of the problem. The fundamental causes of poor academic performance, they claim, are not to be found in the schools, but rather in the institutions of direct democratic control by which the schools have traditionally been governed. Reformers fail to solve the problem-when the institutions ARE the problem. The authors recommend a new system of public education, built around parent-student choice and school competition, that would promote school autonomy—thus providing a firm foundation for genuine school improvement and superior student achievement.
Restructuring in the Classroom goes into the classrooms of three elementary schools to take a detailed look at how teachers responded to changes in structure in their schools. The authors interviewed principals, teachers, parents, support staff, and district personnel to produce in-depth case studies of schools at various stages of restructuring, showing what the school had done to change its structure and how those changes had occurred. Selecting four teachers in each school for closer observation and discussion, the authors reveal how those teachers responded to the changes around them in their day-to-day practice in the classroom. They show, for example, how teaching practice is or is not affected by changes in the way students are grouped for learning, in the way teachers relate to groups of students and to each other, and in the way time is allocated to subject matter.
Discusses how school choice, misapplied standards of accountability, the No Child Left Behind mandate, and the use of a corporate model have all led to a decline in public education and presents arguments for a return to strong neighborhood schools and quality teaching.