This book takes a comprehensive look at community engagement strategies in education to demonstrate the diverse nature of school-community relations and their value to promote their effective ...development. The author brings twenty years of experience in various educational settings in Ontario and California to examining community involvement policies and their interpretation, as well as school-community collaboration in practice. Chapters include recent research on school-community collaboration from the perspective of teachers, school district leaders, administrators, and support staff within two school districts in a low-income and culturally diverse urban community. The book also includes perspectives from community members involved in organizations across the city with a mandate to work with youth. In a time where students' academic, social, and emotional support needs are on the rise, this book offers a valuable resource for strengthening school-community relations and demonstrating the power of collaboration.
We study the relationship between school organizational contexts, teacher turnover, and student achievement in New York City (NYC) middle schools. Using factor analysis, we construct measures of four ...distinct dimensions of school climate captured on the annual NYC School Survey. We identify credible estimates by isolating variation in organizational contexts within schools over time. We find that improvements in school leadership especially, as well as in academic expectations, teacher relationships, and school safety are all independently associated with corresponding reductions in teacher turnover. Increases in school safety and academic expectations also correspond with student achievement gains. These results are robust to a range of threats to validity suggesting that our findings are consistent with an underlying causal relationship.
Together, culture and climate can make or break your school improvement efforts. Authors Todd Whitaker and Steve Gruenert help educators understand how to leverage culture and climate to drive deep ...and lasting change. Learn how to assess current culture, address climate issues, combat challenges, and work toward a collaborative school community dedicated to achieving high levels of learning for all. Rely on this book's effective school improvement strategies for creating a collaborative culture in schools: (1) Understand the commonalities and differences between school climate and school culture; (2) Identify the characteristics of specific types of classroom cultures for self-assessment and improvement in creating a positive classroom climate; (3) Learn how to assess the values and beliefs of educators at the classroom and school levels; (4) Discover your school's capacity for culture change using a step-by-step process; and (5) Consider how the elements of climate and culture influence school effectiveness and school improvement efforts.
There's a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation's school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets ...chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it's no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower "lunch ladies" to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children? The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft,The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.
Why busing failed Delmont, Matthew F
2016., 20160301, 2016, 2016-03-01, Volume:
42
eBook
In the decades after the landmarkBrown v. Board of EducationSupreme Court decision, busing to achieve school desegregation became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues.Why Busing ...Failedis the first book to examine the pitched battles over busing on a national scale, focusing on cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, Michigan. This groundbreaking book shows how school officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents who opposed school desegregation over the civil rights of black students.This broad and incisive history of busing features a cast of characters that includes national political figures such as then-president Richard Nixon, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and antibusing advocate Louise Day Hicks, as well as some lesser-known activists on both sides of the issue-Boston civil rights leaders Ruth Batson and Ellen Jackson, who opposed segregated schools, and Pontiac housewife and antibusing activist Irene McCabe, black conservative Clay Smothers, and Florida governor Claude Kirk, all supporters of school segregation.Why Busing Failedshows how antibusing parents and politicians ultimately succeeded in preventing full public school desegregation.
Encyclopedia of School Health Wiley, David C; Phillips Buckenmeyer, Amy Carol
SAGE Publications, Inc. eBooks,
2013, 2013-09-18
eBook
Open access
The Encyclopedia of School Health offers quick access to health and wellness information most relevant to children in America′s K-12 school setting. Valuable guidance is provided on: developmental ...stages; acute and chronic illnesses; special education; nutrition; crisis response; prevention; and more.
As media reports declare crisis after crisis in public education, Americans find themselves hotly debating educational inequalities that seem to violate their nation's ideals. Why does success in ...school track so closely with race and socioeconomic status? How to end these apparent achievement gaps?In the Crossfirebrings historical perspective to these debates by tracing the life and work of Marcus Foster, an African American educator who struggled to reform urban schools in the 1960s and early 1970s. As a teacher, principal, and superintendent-first in his native Philadelphia and eventually in Oakland, California-Foster made success stories of urban schools and children whom others had dismissed as hopeless, only to be assassinated in 1973 by the previously unknown Symbionese Liberation Army in a bizarre protest against an allegedly racist school system. Foster's story encapsulates larger social changes in the decades after World War II: the great black migration from South to North, the civil rights movement, the decline of American cities, and the ever-increasing emphasis on education as a ticket to success. Well before the accountability agenda of the No Child Left Behind Act or the rise of charter schools, Americans came into sharp conflict over urban educational failure, with some blaming the schools and others pointing to conditions in homes and neighborhoods. By focusing on an educator who worked in the trenches and had a reputation for bridging divisions,In the Crossfiresheds new light on the continuing ideological debates over race, poverty, and achievement. Foster charted a course between the extremes of demanding too little and expecting too much of schools as agents of opportunity in America. He called for accountability not only from educators but also from families, taxpayers, and political and economic institutions. His effort to mobilize multiple constituencies was a key to his success-and a lesson for educators and policymakers who would take aim at achievement gaps without addressing the full range of school and nonschool factors that create them.
In the first book to present the history of Baltimore school desegregation, Howell S. Baum shows how good intentions got stuck on what Gunnar Myrdal called the "American Dilemma." Immediately after ...the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the city's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary.
Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else.
Baum finds that American liberalism is the key to explaining how this happened. Myrdal observed that many whites believed in equality in the abstract but considered blacks inferior and treated them unequally. School officials were classical liberals who saw the world in terms of individuals, not races. They adopted a desegregation policy that explicitly ignored students' race and asserted that all students were equal in freedom to choose schools, while their policy let whites who disliked blacks avoid integration. School officials' liberal thinking hindered them from understanding or talking about the city's history of racial segregation, continuing barriers to desegregation, and realistic change strategies.
From the classroom to city hall, Baum examines how Baltimore's distinct identity as a border city between North and South shaped local conversations about the national conflict over race and equality. The city's history of wrestling with the legacy of Brown reveals Americans' preferred way of dealing with racial issues: not talking about race. This avoidance, Baum concludes, allows segregation to continue.
Based on more than two years of fieldwork conducted in a Yemeni community in southeastern Michigan, this unique study examines Yemeni American girls' attempts to construct and make sense of their ...identities as Yemenis, Muslims, Americans, daughters of immigrants, teenagers, and high school students.All American Yemeni Girlscontributes substantially to our understanding of the impact of religion on students attending public schools and the intersecting roles school and religion play in the lives of Yemeni students and their families. Providing a valuable background on the history of Yemen and the migration of Yemeni people to the United States, this is an eye-opening account of a group of people we hear about every day but about whom we know very little.Through a series of intensive interviews and field observations, Loukia K. Sarroub discovered that the young Muslim women shared moments of optimism and desperation and struggled to reconcile the America they experienced at school with the Yemeni lives they knew at home. Most significant, Sarroub found that they often perceived themselves as failing at being both American and Yemeni. Offering a distinctive analysis of the ways ethnicity, culture, gender, and socioeconomic status complicate lives, Sarroub examines how these students view their roles within American and Yemeni societies, between institutions such as the school and the family, between ethnic and Islamic visions of success in the United States. Sarroub argues that public schools serve as a site of liberation and reservoir of contested hope for students and teachers questioning competing religious and cultural pressures. The final chapter offers a rich and important discussion of how conditions in the United States encourage the rise of extremism and allow it to flourish, raising pressing questions about the role of public education in the post-September 11 world.All American Yemeni Girlsoffers a fine-grained and compelling portrait of these young Muslim women and their endeavors to succeed in American society, and it brings us closer to understanding an oft-cited but little researched population.