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The authors argue that the most influential and well-known educational policy programs in the past 30 years are not based on democratic consensus, but are instead formulated by the political community as symbolic efforts meant to generate personal partisan gain.
This book analyses the ways in which schools in urban areas are shaped and influenced by social, economic and political forces within the social environment. Utilizing research from schools in Chicago, the book will show how schools attempt to.
Dystopia and Education: Insights into Theory, Praxis, and Policy in an age of Utopia Gone Wrong provides an as-of-yet unexplored critical perspective for examining contemporary educational theory, praxis, and policy with particular reference to the current state of dehumanizing and often oppressive policy and practices that have come to demarcate the era of NCLB and RTT. The authors in this collection employ dystopian themes found in literature, film, visual art, and video games as the lens for that critical inquiry. As such Dystopia and Education: Insights into Theory, Praxis, and Policy is an essential contribution to the philosophical/critical tradition in educational scholarship. It is especially valuable because the inquiry undertaken is from a new perspective—one that will extend the critical tradition into a yet unexplored arena. Given the educational climate established by NCLB and RTT, this collection is especially important to the ongoing critical analysis of such policy mandates. There is also a significantly important timeliness to this book given NCLB’s utopian expectation of universal academic proficiency among American schoolchildren by the year 2014: as educators race to achieve such a noble yet naïve goal, this collection of essays examines the educational environment that has been enacted to achieve such ends, and describes our current state as a utopia-gone wrong.
The fate of public education and therefore the future of our democracy is at risk. Powerful forces are eroding commitment to public schools and weakening democratic resolve. Yet even in deeply troubling times, it is possible to broaden social imagination and empower efforts toward systemic progressive reform. This book is an invitation for widespread participation in a complex process—re-envisioning education and democracy. To reenvision—to envision and then envision again—is to join with others in imagining new possibilities and bringing these into existence. Re-envisioning is a radically social process. Although distinct and varied individual contributions are required, transformative visions cannot be advanced through the agency of one charismatic person, or bound by one influential perspective. The process of re-envisioning, like all forms of democratic living and learning, draws energy and insight when connection and communion are sustained across dimensions of difference. Re-envisioning is an intensely creative and exploratory process. It is not accomplished through careful construction of “best laid plans” aimed at attaining certainty and control. Re-envisioning is instead experienced and evolved by preparing for, and then acting on, informed and strategic glimpses. These brief and fleeting impressions—multimodal and multi-sensory, incomplete and ambiguous, always in motion—offer potentials, but no definitive answers. Re-envisioning is a profoundly ethical and aesthetic process, centered in prospects for social justice, compassion, reform, and renewal. Social movements are rarely motivated by commitments to narrow objectives aimed at solving specific problems. Across time and cultures we are drawn to persons and processes, to ideas and images, that call us back to remember our highest principles, and move us forward to respond with acts of integrity and grace. Recurrent themes of beauty and power—here mirrored in chapter titles—inspire, guide, and liberate collective vision and principled action. Re-envisioning, although accessible to all, remains largely undeveloped and underutilized. Our collective ability to realize progressive aspirations for education and democracy can be significantly enhanced by integrating the process of re-envisioning with other, more familiar, educational and political reform strategies.
Co-published by Routledge for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Educational policy continues to be of major concern. Policy debates about economic growth and national competitiveness, for example, commonly focus on the importance of human capital and a highly educated workforce. Defining the theoretical boundaries and methodological approaches of education policy research are the two primary themes of this comprehensive, AERA-sponsored Handbook. Organized into seven sections, the Handbook focuses on (1) disciplinary foundations of educational policy, (2) methodological perspectives, (3) the policy process, (4) resources, management, and organization, (5) teaching and learning policy, (6) actors and institutions, and (7) education access and differentiation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, the Handbook’s over one hundred authors address three central questions: What policy issues and questions have oriented current policy research? What research strategies and methods have proven most fruitful? And what issues, questions, and methods will drive future policy research? Topics such as early childhood education, school choice, access to higher education, teacher accountability, and testing and measurement cut across the 63 chapters in the volume. The politics surrounding these and other issues are objectively analyzed by authors and commentators. Each of the seven sections concludes with two commentaries by leading scholars in the field. The first considers the current state of policy design, and the second addresses the current state of policy research. This book is appropriate for scholars and graduate students working in the field of education policy and for the growing number of academic, government, and think-tank researchers engaged in policy research. For more information on the American Educational Research Association, please visit: http://www.aera.net/.
The chapters in this edited volume raise important issues of the relation between research and its various external "publics".
This thoroughly revised edition of Educating the "Right" Way brings readers up to date on what are now clearly lasting transformations in the movements, ideologies, assumptions, structures, and practices of education.
For more than three decades Michael Apple has sought to uncover and articulate the connections among knowledge, teaching and power in education. In this collection, Michael brings together 13 of his key writings in one place, providing an overview not just of his own career but the larger development of the field.
This new edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality critically examines the deep and enduring problems within systems of education in the U.S., in order to illuminate what is really at stake for students, teachers, and communities negatively affected by such testing. Updates to the new edition include new chapters that focus on: the role of schools and standardized testing in reproducing social, cultural, and economic inequalities; the way high-stakes testing is used to advance neoliberal, market-based educational schemes that ultimately concentrate wealth and power among elites; how standardized testing became the dominant tool within our educational systems; the numerous technical and ideological problems with using standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, and schools; the role that high-stakes testing plays in the maintenance of white supremacy; and how school communities have resisted high-stakes testing and used better assessments of student learning. Parents, teachers, university students, and scholars will find Unequal By Design useful for gaining a broad, critical understanding of the issues surrounding our over-reliance on high-stakes, standardized testing in the U.S. through up-to-date research on testing, historical and contemporary examples of the struggles over such tests, and information about how testing has fostered the privatization of public education in the U.S.
In this book, Chomsky builds a larger understanding of our educational needs, starting with the changing role of schools today, yet broadening our view toward new models of public education for citizenship.