As educators and legislators across the country debate how to improve public schools, the most vital factor often disappears from the equation—the relationship between the teacher and the student. According to veteran educators Rita and Marco Portales, this relationship is the central issue in the education of students, especially Latino/a students who often face serious barriers to school success because of the legacy of racism, insufficient English-language skills, and cultural differences with the educational establishment.
To break down these barriers and help Latino/a students acquire a quality education, the Portaleses focus attention on the teacher-student relationship and offer a proven method that teachers can use to strengthen the print and oral skills of their students. They begin by analyzing the reasons why schools too often fail to educate Latino/a students, using eloquent comments from young Latinos/as and their parents to confirm how important the teacher-student relationship is to the student's success. Then they show how all educational stakeholders—teachers, administrators, state education agencies, legislators, and parents—can work together to facilitate the teacher-student relationship and improve student education. By demonstrating how teachers can improve students' reading, critical thinking, writing, and oral communication skills across the curriculum, they argue that learning can be made more relevant for students, keeping their interest levels high while preparing them for academically competitive colleges.
Advanced countries of the world have taken a hundred years to work out systems of primary education reasonably well adapted to the needs of their communities and to the varied capacities of the children in their schools; today many of the developing countries are trying to do the same thing in a decade. At first sight it might appear that with the help and experience of the developed word they could leap a century and establish straight away something approaching the modern classroom without having to plod through the stage of dreary formalism that marked the first fifty years of our system of compulsory education, in much the same way that many of them have been ushered into the air-age without ever knowing the smoke and dirt of a nineteenth-century railway system.
As Director of Education for New Zealand, with responsibilities also in Western Samoa and in New Zealand's Pacific Islands dependencies, for many years C. E. Beeby had to deal with two educational systems at very different levels of development. He reluctantly comes to the conclusion that new countries cannot simply adopt the systems that have evolved in other nations. He argues that an educational system of high quality must develop in distinct stages through which all systems, at least of a certain type, must pass, and which, though they may be shortened, cannot be skipped. Two main factors determine the stage of development of any primary school system: the level of general education of its teachers, and the length and type of their professional training.
Beeby emphasizes the need for young countries to maintain high educational standards in the face of an explosion of demand for schooling. He comments controversially on the respective roles of the economist and the educator in educational planning and on the need for a truly educational theory of growth to balance the economic theories that have tended to dominate educational planning. In a chapter as significant for developed countries as for emergent ones, he discusses conservatism in education and the peculiar pattern of resistance to change among the teaching profession. Beeby concludes with an examination of the difficulties young nations encounter in attempting to solve some of their problems through the application of new educational technology, and he describes the investigation that must be undertaken before one may assume that the new techniques and media can materially affect educational planning in these countries over the next decade.
In southern politics, 1970 marked a watershed. A group of southern governors entered office that year and changed both the way the nation looked at the South and the way the constituents of those states viewed themselves. Reubin Askew in Florida, John West in South Carolina, Jimmy Carter in Georgia, and Albert Brewer in Alabama all represented a new breed of progressive moderate politician that helped demolish Jim Crow segregation and the dual economies, societies, and educational systems notorious to the Sunbelt South. Historian Gordon Harvey explores the political lives and legacies of three of these governors, examining the conditions that led to such a radical change in political leadership, the effects their legislative agendas had on the identity of their states, and the aftermath of their terms in elected office.
A common thread in each governor's agenda was educational reform. Albert Brewer's short term as Alabama governor resulted in a sweeping education package that still stands as the most progressive the state has seen. Reubin Askew, far more outspoken than Brewer, won the Florida gubernatorial election through a campaign that openly promoted desegregation, busing, and tax reform as a means of equal school funding. John West's commitment to a policy of inclusion helped allay fears of both black and white parents and made South Carolina's one of the smoothest transitions to integrated schools.
As members of the first generation of New South governors, Brewer, Askew, and West played the role of trailblazers. Their successful assaults on economic and racial injustice in their states were certainly aided by such landmark events as Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights movement, and the expansion of voting rights-all of which sounded the death knell for the traditional one-party segregated South. But in this critical detailing of their work for justice, we learn how these reform-minded men made education central to their gubernatorial terms and, in doing so, helped redefine the very character of the place they called home.
Tenure is the abortion issue of the academy, igniting arguments and inflaming near-religious passions. To some, tenure is essential to academic freedom and a magnet to recruit and retain top-flight faculty. To others, it is an impediment to professorial accountability and a constraint on institutional flexibility and finances. But beyond anecdote and opinion, what do we really know about how tenure works?
In this unique book, Richard Chait and his colleagues offer the results of their research on key empirical questions. Are there circumstances under which faculty might voluntarily relinquish tenure? When might new faculty actually prefer non-tenure track positions? Does the absence of tenure mean the absence of shared governance? Why have some colleges abandoned tenure while others have adopted it? Answers to these and other questions come from careful studies of institutions that mirror the American academy: research universities and liberal arts colleges, including both highly selective and less prestigious schools.
Lucid and straightforward, The Questions of Tenure offers vivid pictures of academic subcultures. Chait and his colleagues conclude that context counts so much that no single tenure system exists. Still, since no academic reward carries the cachet of tenure, few institutions will initiate significant changes without either powerful external pressures or persistent demands from new or disgruntled faculty.
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