Results by title
76 books match the query 'Educational change' and 17 start with t
Teachers and Reform
Chicago Public Education, 1929-70John F. Lyons
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Examining teachers' unions and public education from the bottom up, Lyons shows how the CTU and its members sought rigorous reforms. A combination of political action, public relations campaigns, and community alliances helped the CTU to achieve better salaries and benefits, increased school budgets, reformed curricula, and greater equality for women within the public education system. But its agenda was also constrained by internal divisions over race and gender and by ongoing external disputes with the school administration, politicians, and business and civic organizations.
Detailed and informed by rich interviews, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929-1970 tells the story of how committed union members effected changes to public education and to local politics that still benefit Chicago teachers, students, and the city today.
Teaching in the Terrordome
Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for AmericaHeather Kirn Lanier
University of Missouri Press, 2012
The Ambitious Elementary School
Its Conception, Design, and Implications for Educational EqualityElizabeth McGhee Hassrick, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Lisa Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Drawing on an in-depth study of real schools on the South Side of Chicago, Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Lisa Rosen argue that effectively meeting the challenge of educational inequality requires a complete reorganization of institutional structures as well as wholly new norms, values, and practices that are animated by a relentless commitment to student learning. They examine a model that pulls teachers out of their isolated classrooms and places them into collaborative environments where they can share their curricula, teaching methods, and assessments of student progress with a school-based network of peers, parents, and other professionals. Within this structure, teachers, school leaders, social workers, and parents collaborate to ensure that every child receives instruction tailored to his or her developing skills. Cooperating schools share new tools for assessment and instruction and become sites for the training of new teachers. Parents become respected partners, and expert practitioners work with researchers to evaluate their work and refine their models for educational organization and practice. The authors show not only what such a model looks like but the dramatic results it produces for student learning and achievement.
The result is a fresh, deeply informed, and remarkably clear portrait of school reform that directly addresses the real problems of educational inequality.
The Assault on Universities
A Manifesto for ResistanceEdited by Michael Bailey and Des Freedman
Pluto Press, 2011
With funding cuts well under way and many institutions already promising to charge the maximum £9,000 yearly tuition fee, university education for the majority is under threat. This book exposes the true motives behind the government's programme and provides the analytical tools to fight it.
Widespread student protests and occupations, often supported by staff, unions and society at large, show the public's opposition to funding cuts and fee increases. The contributors to this sharp, well-written collection, many of whom are active participants in the anti-cuts movement, outline what's at stake and why it matters. They argue that university education is becoming increasingly skewed towards vocational degrees, which devalues the arts and social sciences – subjects that allow creativity and political inquiry to flourish.
Released at the beginning of the new academic year, this book will be at the heart of debates around the future of higher education in the UK and beyond, inspiring both new and seasoned activists in the fight for the soul of our universities.
The Education Alibi
Tracing Education's Entanglements Across Contemporary AfricaElizabeth Cooper, Erdmute Alber, and Wandia Njoya, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2025
The Fantasy Economy
Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform MovementKraus, Neil
Temple University Press, 2023
The Fantasy Economy challenges the basic assumptions of the education reform movement of the last few decades. Kraus insists that education cannot control the labor market and unreliable corporate narratives fuel this misinformation. Moreover, misguided public policies, such as accountability and school choice, along with an emphasis on workforce development and STEM over broad-based liberal arts education, have only produced greater inequality.
Ultimately, The Fantasy Economy argues that education should be understood as a social necessity, not an engine of the neoliberal agenda. Kraus’ book advocates for a change in conventional thinking about economic opportunity and the purpose of education in a democracy.
The Grit and the Grind
Building High-Performing Education Systems in an Era of PolarizationJoshua L. Glazer, Cori Egan, William R. Berry, and Amar Fattal
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Offers a much-needed perspective on the connections between community, policymaking, and the improvement of underperforming schools.
School reform remains a fraught issue in the United States as educators, policymakers, and communities strive to improve outcomes for all students. In The Grit and the Grind, Joshua L. Glazer, Cori Egan, William R. Berry, and Amar Fattal examine two ambitious efforts to improve the lowest-performing schools in Memphis, Tennessee. The book offers a rare inside look at the political, organizational, and educational challenges of improving schools at scale.
The two initiatives, the Achievement School District (ASD) and the Shelby County Innovation Zone (iZone), shared a common goal but pursued it through fundamentally different approaches. The ASD was a state-run turnaround district that removed schools from local control and placed them under the management of charter organizations. By contrast, the iZone operated through existing district institutions, relying on local educators and leaders to drive improvement. Despite common goals and substantial resources, the reforms developed in strikingly different ways. Drawing on years of research in Memphis, the authors move beyond familiar debates about charter schools and district reform to explore a deeper question: What does it take to improve schools in complex, pluralistic, and contested democratic societies? Their analysis reveals that educational improvement is simultaneously professional, organizational, and political. Efforts to enhance educational opportunities depend not only on curriculum, leadership, and expertise, but also on the legitimacy, trust, and community support that allow educational systems to learn from experience and sustain improvement.
At once a study of reform, organizations, and politics, The Grit and the Grind challenges simple explanations of success and failure, showing that meaningful improvement is forged through the slow, uncertain work of building systems capable of earning community trust while continuously strengthening teaching and learning.
The Impracticality of Practical Research
A History of Contemporary Sciences of Change That ConserveThomas S. Popkewitz
University of Michigan Press, 2020
There is an alluring desire that research should lead us to find the practical knowledge that enables people to live a good life in a just and equitable society. This desire haunted the 19th century emergence of the social sciences as a discipline, then became more pronounced in the postwar mobilizations of research. Today that desire lives on in the international assessments of national schools and in the structure of professional education, both of which influence government modernization of schools and also provide for people’s well-being. American policy thus reflects research in which reforms are verified by “scientific, empirical evidences” about “what works” in experiments, and “will work” therefore in society.
The book explores the idea that practical and useful knowledge changes over time, and shows how this knowledge has been (re)visioned in contemporary research on educational reform, instructional improvement, and professionalization. The study of science draws on a range of social and cultural theories and historical studies to understand the politics of science, as well as scientific knowledge that is concerned with social and educational change. Research hopes to change social conditions to create a better life, and to shape people whose conduct embodies these valued characteristics—the good citizen, parent, or worker. Yet this hope continually articulates the dangers that threaten this future. Thomas Popkewitz explores how the research to correct social wrongs is paradoxically entangled with the inscription of differences that ultimately hamper the efforts to include.
The Improviser's Classroom
Pedagogies for Cocreative WorldmakingEdited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Lomanno
Temple University Press, 2024
Demonstrating how improvisation can inform scenes of teaching and learning, this volume also outlines how improvisatory techniques offer powerful, if not vital, tools for producing connection, creativity, accompaniment, reciprocity, meaningful revelation, and lifelong curiosity.
The Improviser's Classroom champions activist pedagogies and the public work essential for creating communities bound together by reciprocal care and equity.
Contributors: Sibongile Bhebhe, Judit Csobod, Michael Dessen, jashen edwards, Kate Galloway, Tomie Hahn, Petro Janse van Vuuren, Lauren Michelle Levesque, George Lipsitz, Rich Marsella, Tracy McMullen, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ed Sarath, Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Ellen Waterman, Carey West, and the editors
The Instruction Myth
Why Higher Education is Hard to Change, and How to Change ItJohn Tagg
Rutgers University Press, 2019
The Instruction Myth argues that yes, higher education can be reformed and reinvigorated, but it will not be an easy process. In fact, it will require universities to abandon their central operating principle, the belief that education revolves around instruction, easily measurable in course syllabi, credits, and enrollments. Acclaimed education scholar John Tagg presents a powerful case that instruction alone is worthless and that universities should instead be centered upon student learning, which is far harder to quantify and standardize. Yet, as he shows, decades of research have indicated how to best promote student learning, but few universities have systematically implemented these suggestions.
This book demonstrates why higher education must undergo radical change if it hopes to survive. More importantly, it offers specific policy suggestions for how universities can break their harmful dependence on the instruction myth. In this extensively researched book, Tagg offers a compelling diagnosis of what’s ailing American higher education and a prescription for how it might still heal itself.
The Making of the Modern University
Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of MoralityJulie A. Reuben
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Based on extensive research at eight universities—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and California at Berkeley—Reuben examines the aims of university reformers in the context of nineteenth-century ideas about truth. She argues that these educators tried to apply new scientific standards to moral education, but that their modernization efforts ultimately failed. By exploring the complex interaction between institutional and intellectual change, Reuben enhances our understanding of the modern university, the secularization of intellectual life, and the association of scientific objectivity with value-neutrality.
The Market Comes to Education in Sweden
An Evaluation of Sweden's Surprising School ReformsAnders Bjorklund
Russell Sage Foundation, 2005
The Moral Electricity of Print
Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women's Circuit, 1876-1910Ronald Briggs
Vanderbilt University Press, 2017
Moral electricity—a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century.
As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, "the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests." The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.
The Production of Living Knowledge
The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North AmericaGigi Roggero
Temple University Press, 2011
Evaluating higher education institutions—particularly the rise of the “global university”—and their rapidly changing role in the global era, Gigi Roggero finds the system in crisis. In his groundbreaking book, The Production of Living Knowledge, Roggero examines the university system as a key site of conflict and transformation within “cognitive capitalism”—a regime in which knowledge has become increasingly central to the production process at large. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out through the activist method of conricerca, or “co-research,” wherein researchers are also subjects, Roggero’s book situates the crisis of the university and the changing composition of its labor force against the backdrop of the global economic crisis.
Combining a discussion of radical experiments in education, new student movements, and autonomist Marxian (or post-operaista) social theory, Roggero produces a distinctly transnational and methodologically innovative critique of the global university from the perspective of what he calls “living knowledge.”
In light of new student struggles in the United States and across the world, this first English-language edition is particularly timely.
The Starting Line
Latina/o Children, Texas Schools, and National Debates on Early EducationBy Robert Crosnoe
University of Texas Press, 2020
How can we create high-quality learning environments for children from socially, politically, and economically marginalized groups? How do early childhood programs help to overcome the challenges created by poverty? Seeking to answer these questions, The Starting Line delves into the ups and downs of early education programs serving Latinas/os in Texas, using the state as a window into broader debates about academic opportunity and the changing demographics of the United States.
Immersing readers in the day-to-day activities of Texas's early childhood education programs, Robert Crosnoe illuminates how significant obstacles can stymie the best intentions. Crosnoe pays particular attention to the complex connections among classrooms, schools, families, and communities, as well as the frequently unfolding interplay of educational philosophies. The result is a story highlighting the promises of early childhood education, the perils faced in attempting to fulfill them, and the degree to which Texas stands at the forefront of some larger movements and lags behind in others.
Giving voice to bilingual educators and low-income Latina/o families, this book is a timely exploration of the strengths and needs of what will soon be the largest share of the US child population.
The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development
Values, the Practicum, and Programmatic Change in Writing StudiesAdrienne Jankens
Utah State University Press, 2026
Through her multi-site analysis, Jankens examines the ways values are reflected in syllabi, committee meetings, and classroom practices. She demonstrates how values that are often unstated or assumed can be made explicit and linked to programmatic action, thus supporting development and aligning instructional goals with broader institutional objectives. Offering a nuanced framework on practicum courses, Jankens also highlights the importance of local contexts and distinguishes among tacit, implicit, explicit, emergent, and articulated values. This layered understanding helps reveal the often hidden mechanisms by which writing program values are enacted in day-to-day teaching practices.
Teacher development is a crucial site for enacting and understanding programmatic values, and making these values explicit can guide meaningful programmatic change. Providing an institutional ethnography of Jankens’s own writing program and situating those findings within broader conversations in writing studies, The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development adds to scholarship exploring the focus of the practicum course, the positionality and experience of graduate teaching assistants in writing programs, and the perennial work of the field to identify its core values and disciplinary identity.
Toward Wiser Public Judgment
Daniel Yankelovich
Vanderbilt University Press, 2011
In his lead chapter, Dan Yankelovich urges us to move away from a "misleading model of public opinion" that "dominates the expert culture of our society, including journalists, scientists, business leaders, scholars, professional experts, and political leaders." He and the other contributors (Will Friedman, Keith Melville, Robert Kingston, Alison Kadlec, Steven A. Rosell, and Heidi Gantwerk) describe methods used by organizations like Public Agenda, National Issues Forums, and Viewpoint Learning, Inc., to advance the public's learning curve through various forms of civic engagement, education, dialogue and deliberation.
They provide case studies of education reform in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and math and science initiatives in the Kansas City area, and examples of programs that have focused on issues ranging from energy and health care to US-Muslim relations. One chapter is a dialogue between Yankelovich and Friedman.
While our political culture resonates to the public's desire for a stronger voice, it fails to ensure that this voice reflects anything more than the spin, spectacle, and excessive partisanship that dominate today's public discourse. Toward Wiser Public Judgment offers insights and strategies to counteract these troubling trends.