Results by title
198 books match the query 'Educational Policy & Reform' and 15 start with s
School Choice Tradeoffs
Liberty, Equity, and DiversityBy R. Kenneth Godwin and Frank R. Kemerer
University of Texas Press, 2002
Educational policy in a democracy goes beyond teaching literacy and numeracy. It also supports teaching moral reasoning, political tolerance, respect for diversity, and citizenship. Education policy should encourage liberty and equality of opportunity, hold educational institutions accountable, and be efficient. School Choice Tradeoffs examines the tradeoffs among these goals when government affords parents the means to select the schools their children attend.
Godwin and Kemerer compare current policy that uses family residence to assign students to schools with alternative policies that range from expanding public choice options to school vouchers. They identify the benefits and costs of each policy approach through a review of past empirical literature, the presentation of new empirical work, and legal and philosophic analysis.
The authors offer a balanced perspective that goes beyond rhetoric and ideology to offer policymakers and the public insight into the complex tradeoffs that are inherent in the design and implementation of school choice policies. While all policies create winners and losers, the key questions concern who these individuals are and how much they gain or lose. By placing school choice within a broader context, this book will stimulate reflective thought in all readers.
School Zone
A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and VictimizationPamela Wilcox, Graham C. Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer
Temple University Press, 2022
Schools should be safe—but they are not always safe for everybody. Authors Pamela Wilcox, Graham Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer studied crime among students located across diverse middle- and high-school settings to investigate why some students engage in delinquency—but others do not—and why some students are more prone to victimization. School Zone focuses on the three key interactional elements—context, victims, and offenders—to understand and explain the impact of common crimes such as theft, weapon carrying, drug possession and the verbal, physical, and sexual harassment of classmates.
The authors also consider how individual students and schools respond to crime and threats. They analyze the variables that schools can control in planning and practice that explain why some schools have higher crime rates. School Zone uses empirical studies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the patterns and causes of variation in individual- and aggregate-level school-based offending and victimization experiences while also addressing the adequacy of wide-ranging criminological explanations and crime prevention policies.
In their conclusion, the authors assess the extent to which currently popular strategies of school crime prevention align with what they have discovered through their problem-analysis framework and scientific understandings of student offending and victimization.
Schooled and Sorted
How Educational Categories Create InequalityThurston Domina
Russell Sage Foundation, 2023
Some educational categories have broadly egalitarian consequences. Indeed, Domina, Penner, and Penner argue that when societies enroll young people in school, making them students, they mark them as individuals who are worthy of rights. But other educational categories reinforce powerful social categories—including race, gender, and class—and ultimately reproduce social and economic inequality in society. Elite colleges, tracked high schools, and elementary school gifted programs provide not only different educational experiences, but also create merit and inequality by sorting students into categories that are defined by the students who are excluded.
Schooled & Sorted highlights that many of the decisions that define educational categories occur in school-based committee meetings and other relatively local settings. The local nature of these decisions provides many opportunities to define educational categories differently, and for school communities to bring about change.
Schooled & Sorted is an illuminating investigation into the ways sorting within schools translates into inequality in the larger world. While some educational categorization may be unavoidable, the authors suggest ways to build a more equitable system—and thus a more equitable society.
Schooling Selves
Autonomy, Interdependence, and Reform in Japanese Junior High EducationPeter Cave
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cave examines the implementation of “relaxed education” reforms that attempted to promote individual autonomy and free thinking in Japanese classrooms. As he shows, however, these policies were eventually transformed by educators and school administrators into curricula and approaches that actually promoted social integration over individuality, an effect opposite to the reforms’ intended purpose. With vivid detail, he offers the voices of teachers, students, and parents to show what happens when national education policies run up against long-held beliefs and practices, and what their complex and conflicted interactions say about the production of self and community in education. The result is a fascinating analysis of a turbulent era in Japanese education that offers lessons for educational practitioners in any country.
Schools Betrayed
Roots of Failure in Inner-City EducationKathryn M. Neckerman
University of Chicago Press, 2007
The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In Schools Betrayed, her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts.
Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, Neckerman compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, she contends, stemmed from Chicago officials’ decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. And it deepened, she shows, because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago’s black community, leaving educators unable to help their most disadvantaged students.
Schools Betrayed will be required reading for anyone who cares about urban education.
Schools in the Landscape
Localism, Cultural Tradition, and the Development of Alabama's Public Education System, 1865-1915Edith M. Ziegler
University of Alabama Press, 2010
Where culture met classroom—how Alabama’s past shaped its public schools.
Schools in the Landscape offers a richly detailed and deeply contextualized history of public education in Alabama during the transformative half-century following the Civil War. In this groundbreaking study, Edith M. Ziegler examines how localism, cultural tradition, and social conservatism shaped the development of Alabama’s public school system between 1865 and 1915—a period marked by Reconstruction, Redemption, and the entrenchment of racial segregation.
Ziegler explores how Alabama’s rural, economically challenged, and culturally conservative communities influenced the structure and function of public education. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, she investigates the roles of teachers, schoolhouses, funding mechanisms, and community rituals in shaping educational experiences. The book also delves into the dual system of Black and white schools, highlighting the systemic inequalities and the resilience of African American communities in the face of institutionalized racism.
Through chapters on Progressive Era reforms, local festivals, and the symbolic role of schools in civic life, Ziegler reveals how education in Alabama was not merely a top-down initiative but a deeply local and contested process. Her analysis underscores the importance of understanding regional identity and cultural values in the broader narrative of American educational history.
Schools in the Landscape is essential reading for scholars of Southern history, education policy, and cultural studies, offering a nuanced portrait of how public schooling evolved in one of the nation’s most complex and tradition-bound regions.
Schools of Our Own
Chicago's Golden Age of Black Private EducationWorth Kamili Hayes
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Winner, 2020 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award
As battles over school desegregation helped define a generation of civil rights activism in the United States, a less heralded yet equally important movement emerged in Chicago. Following World War II, an unprecedented number of African Americans looked beyond the issue of racial integration by creating their own schools. This golden age of private education gave African Americans unparalleled autonomy to avoid discriminatory public schools and to teach their children in the best ways they saw fit. In Schools of Our Own, Worth Kamili Hayes recounts how a diverse contingent of educators, nuns, and political activists embraced institution building as the most effective means to attain quality education. Schools of Our Own makes a fascinating addition to scholarly debates about education, segregation, African American history, and Chicago, still relevant in contemporary discussions about the fate of American public schooling.
Science and the University
Edited by Paula E. Stephan and Ronald G. Ehrenberg
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Social Constructions of Deafness
Examining Deaf Languacultures in EducationThomas P. Horejes
Gallaudet University Press, 2012
Thomas P. Horejes’s new book focuses on revealing critical knowledge that addresses certain social justice issues, including deafness, language, culture, and deaf education. He conveys this information through discourses about his own experiences being deaf and through his research in which he “stresses the contingency of the social” in educational institutions.
In Social Constructions of Deafness: Examining Deaf Languacultures in Education, Horejes contends that schools as social institutions play powerful and exacting roles in the creation and maintenance of social constructions such as language and culture for deaf children. He subscribes to Michael Agar’s concept of “languaculture,” defined as the inextricable relationship between language and culture in which a specific language will shape and influence culture. His approach employs other anthropological terminology as he connects his personal experience as a deaf student (emic) to academic research on deafness (etic) to bring understanding to the multidimensional aspects of his own negotiated identities.
Horejes extends his inquiry through his analysis of two kindergarten classes for deaf students, one orally oriented and the other conducted using sing language. His findings are sobering evidence of the myriad challenges educators face in defining appropriate academic, linguistic, and cultural pedagogy for deaf children in schools and other social institutions.
State Learning and International Change
Andrew Farkas
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Steady Gains and Stalled Progress
Inequality and the Black-White Test Score GapKatherine Magnuson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2008
Strike for the Common Good
Fighting for the Future of Public EducationRebecca Kolins Givan and Amy Schrager Lang, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2020
In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states—both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce—followed them over the next year. From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable. These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy.
Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, by journalists who have covered these strikes in depth, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise). Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America’s schools.
Structuring Inequality
How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and EducationTracy L. Steffes
University of Chicago Press, 2024
As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies.
In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland’s established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.
Structuring Inequality
How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and EducationTracy L. Steffes
University of Chicago Press, 2024
How inequality was forged, fought over, and forgotten through public policy in metropolitan Chicago.
As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies.
In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland’s established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.
Suddenly Diverse
How School Districts Manage Race and InequalityErica O. Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Suddenly Diverse is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving “Lakeside,” a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving “Fairview,” a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders’ adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner’s findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote “diversity” or eliminate “achievement gaps,” district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism.
While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders’ best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools.