"How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools" tells the story of the extraordinary thirty-year school reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago. Acclaimed educational ...researcher Anthony S. Bryk joins five coauthors directly involved in Chicago's education reform efforts, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny Sebring, Steven E. Tozer, and Timothy Knowles, to illuminate the many factors that led to this transformation of the Chicago Public Schools. Beginning in 1987, Bryk and colleagues lay out the civic context for reform, outlining the systemic challenges such as segregation, institutional racism, and income and resource disparities that reformers grappled with as well as the social conflicts they faced. Next, they describe how fundamental changes occurred at every level of schooling: enhancing classroom instruction; organizing more engaged and effective local school communities; strengthening the preparation, recruitment, and support of teachers and school leaders; and sustaining an ambitious evidence-based campaign to keep the public informed on the progress of key reform initiatives and the challenges still ahead. The power of this capacity building is validated by unprecedented increases in benchmarks such as graduation rates and college matriculation. This riveting account introduces key actors within the schools, city government, and business community, and the partnerships they forged. It also reveals the surprising yet essential role of Chicago's innovative information infrastructure in aligning disparate initiatives. In making clear how elements such as advocacy, civic capacity, improvement research, and strong democracy contributed to large-scale progress in the system's 600-plus schools, the book highlights the greater lessons that the Chicago story offers for system improvement overall.
This thought-provoking and copiously researched book provides educators with a blueprint for radical improvement based on the hard-learned experiences of their peers around the world.
"The Oxford Encyclopedia of School Reform" is a monumental publication that provides a wide-ranging collection of school reform strategies from several geographical regions around the world. It ...illustrates both the theory and practical outcomes of reform efforts situated in different cultural contexts. The major theme that runs through the "Encyclopedia" is both the successes and failures of reforms: the detailed analyses offered in the text have a unique potential to guide future reforms. The power of the text is its ability to shift readers out of their culturally myopic perspective, and to seriously engage with alternative ways of conceptualizing and solving educational problems. The "Encyclopedia" is organized geographically, and each section offers multiple perspectives on school reform initiatives as they have been carried out in different countries and regions around the world. It is the most extensive work of its kind and will be essential reading for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers interested in improving learning outcomes for students at all levels.
Schmoker demonstrates the opportunity for dramatic school improvement by juxtaposing the most effective educational practices with the more common but inferior practices in most schools.
In "Broader, Bolder, Better," authors Elaine Weiss, of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, and Paul Reville, former Massachusetts education secretary, make a compelling case for a ...fundamental change in the way we view education. The authors argue for a large-scale expansion of community-school partnerships in order to provide integrated student supports (ISS) from cradle to careers, including traditional wraparound services like mental health and nutrition supports, as well as early childhood education, afterschool and enrichment programs, and family supports. The book builds on nine years of research by the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a national initiative endorsed by more than sixty policy experts and leaders from across the country. It draws on case studies of effective ISS efforts in twelve diverse communities to illustrate the variety of strategies that can be adopted locally. A call to action that also provides examples of communities that are successfully leveling the playing field for poor children, this book offers a detailed vision for building comprehensive systems to support all children.
Winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Education "The
best book on high school dynamics I have ever read." -Jay Mathews,
Washington Post "A hopeful, easy-to-read narrative on what
the best teachers do and ...what deep, engaging learning looks like
for students. Grab this text if you're looking for a celebration of
what's possible in American schools." - Edutopia "A
must-read for anyone interested in the fate of the American high
school." -Linda Darling-Hammond, President and CEO, Learning Policy
Institute What would it take to transform our high schools into
places capable of supporting deep learning for students across a
wide range of aptitudes and interests? To find out, Jal Mehta and
Sarah Fine spent hundreds of hours observing and talking to
teachers and students in and out of the classroom at thirty of the
country's most innovative schools. To their dismay, they discovered
that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And
yet they found pockets of powerful learning at almost every school,
often in extracurriculars but also in a few mold-breaking academic
courses. So what must schools do to achieve the integrations that
support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery
with identity and creativity? In Search of Deeper Learning
takes a deep dive into the state of our schools and lays out an
inspiring new vision for American education.
When implemented with commitment to collaboration, dual language programs work--and two teachers are better than one. Leveraging the power of teacher collaboration is the key to leading all your ...students to multilingual identity development and language, literacy, and academic success. This practical book adapts a widely used, evidence-based collaboration and co-teaching framework specifically for educators in dual language contexts. Features include: (1) Special consideration to social justice and promoting critical consciousness; (2) Viable options for schools, districts, and state education agencies to effectively support and expand dual language education; (3) Seven proven co-teaching models, newly applied to elementary and secondary dual language environments; (4) Templates and tools for collaborative curriculum alignment and implementation of dual language instruction; and (5) Authentic examples of success from collaborative dual language teams around the US and beyond. More and more schools are implementing dual language programs to serve multilingual learners. This first-of-its-kind innovative resource helps collaborating educators work together to design, deliver, and assess engaging instruction for multilingualism and multiliteracies. Foreword written by Margo Gottlieb.
During the past two decades, Chris Confer and Marco Ramirez have worked to deepen and improve mathematics instruction at schools around the country. Wherever they go, they find the raw ingredients ...for success already present: "The potential for positive change lies within each school. Abundance is present in the form of capable children, teachers, coaches, and principals. Potential energy--what can be--transforms into kinetic energy--what will be--only when a force is accurately applied to move a school in the right direction." In "Small Steps, Big Changes: Eight Essential Practices for Transforming Schools Through Mathematics," the authors identify eight tested principles that transform what can be an overwhelming process into a set of comprehensible and concrete steps. Each phase of the change process is brought to life through the stories and perspectives of teachers, coaches, and principals--stories that will strike familiar chords for every educator. When teachers make sense of math, students learn to make sense of math, and that can profoundly change the entire culture of a school. In one vivid illustration, the authors tell the story of Pueblo Gardens Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, where Marco, as principal, and Chris, as instructional coach, worked alongside a group of dedicated teachers. A few years into the change process, Pueblo Gardens--a school with 96 percent of its students at the poverty level and a high percentage of English language learners--had 94 percent of students meeting or exceeding state standards in third-grade mathematics. Over time, other grades achieved similarly high scores. And once the test scores rose, they were sustained at high levels. The table of contents provides the following chapters: (1) Keep the End in Mind; (2) Understanding the Problem; (3) The Stance of a Researcher; (4) The 80/20 Rule; (5) Patterns of Talk; (6) Patterns in Content; (7) Patterns in Instruction; and (8) Intentionality. The foreword was written by Steven Leinwand.
Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education offers a comprehensive and strategic approach to address what has become labeled as "talent and human capital." Grounded in extensive research and ...examples of leading edge districts, this book shows how the entire human resource system in schools—from recruitment, to selection/placement, induction, professional development, performance management and evaluation, compensation, and career progression—can be reformed and restructured to boost teacher and principal effectiveness in ways that dramatically improve instructional practice and student learning. Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education guides educators towards putting more effective teachers, teacher leaders, and principals in the country’s schools—especially in poverty-impacted urban and rural communities—equipping those teacher and principals with instructional and leadership expertise, and rewarding and retaining those who are successful in attaining these objectives. Drawing from cases, experiences, and deliberations from a national task force, this book outlines a comprehensive framework for how to transform current human resource management practices into authentic, strategic talent management systems in order to improve student achievement.
1. Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education: A Framework
2. A Powerful Education Improvement Strategy
3. Staffing and Recruiting Top Talent
4. Performance Management in Education
5. Measuring Teacher Performance for Strategic Human Capital Management, Anthony Milanowski
6. Induction and Professional Development
7. New Policies for Licensure, Tenure, Evaluation and Dismissal
8. The Compensation Side of Strategic Talent Management
9. Strategic Talent Management for Principals, Steven Kimball
10. Organizing to Implement Strategic Talent Management in Education, Allan Odden, Anthony Milanowski, and Steven Kimball
11. The State Role in Strategic Management of Education Talent
12. The Policy and Political Environment for Change, James A. Kelly
"Rooted in improving student achievement, the book shows how strategy for developing people overlays with strategy for developing rigorous college ready curricula." —Teachers College Record
"This important new book clearly and comprehensively addresses the new work in school reform that is changing the face of human resources in school systems."
-- From the Foreword by Carl A. Cohn, Professor and Co-Director, Urban Leadership Program, Claremont Graduate University
"All the reorganization and restructuring in the world cannot compensate for poorly selected and developed personnel. Allan R. Odden provides future education leaders a comprehensive foundation for ensuring that school systems recruit, select, retain, and develop educators capable of meeting the challenges of high-stakes schooling."
-- Daniel L. Duke, Professor of Educational Leadership, University of Virginia
Allan R. Odden is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Director of Strategic Management of Human Capital, and Co-Director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
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