Education: Books

In today's political environment with the emphasis on testing, standards, and accountability, teachers can easily feel frustrated by the amount of time and resources left over for teaching_for guiding students not only in academics but also in character education. Educators can find themselves losing focus of what initially inspired them to teach. Teachers as Servant Leaders provides pre-service teachers and those currently in the profession with a renewed perspective of not just being a content expert or classroom/behavioral manager, but leaders within their own classrooms, school buildings, and local communities. Building on Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness by Robert Greenleaf, this book applies the concept of servant leadership to the classroom teacher where the focus is on service to students, parents, colleagues, the school and community.

This book addresses issues such as the importance of career development, the relationships between school leadership, culture and teachers lives, maintaining a work-life balance, identity and well-being and the connection between commitment, resilience and effectiveness in the classroom."

What makes an effective teacher? How do you help good teachers become even better? What tools and techniques are available to support and sustain quality teaching? In this companion to the best-selling Qualities of Effective Teachers, you'll find numerous strategies for examining the practice of teaching, helping teachers improve their skills, and establishing an environment that supports good teaching. Each chapter concentrates on a different aspect of teacher effectiveness, and the authors include real-life teacher scenarios with focus questions that prompt readers to analyze the specific qualities of teaching.

In this book educators will find out what happened when authors took their theory of learning, which is based on a wholistic interpretation of brain research, and strived to bring it to life in two schools.

In this thought-provoking and eloquent volume, John Goodlad speaks to all of us who are faced with making critical choices for our nation's children, whether it be in the election arena, our local schools, or within the personal setting of the family. His discussion covers some of our most basic and enduring concerns as well as the pressing and controversial issues of the day, such as school choice, charter schools, home schooling, and the privatization of schooling.

Left Back recounts grandiose efforts by education reformers to use the schools to promote social and political goals, even when they diminished the schools' ability to educate children. It shows how generations of reformers have engaged in social engineering, advocating such innovations as industrial education, intelligence testing, curricular differentiation, and life-adjustment education. These reformers, she demonstrates, simultaneously mounted vigorous campaigns against academic studies." "In describing the wars between competing traditions of education, Ravitch points the way to reviving American education. She argues that all students have the capacity to learn and that all are equally deserving of a solid liberal arts education. Left Back addresses issues of the utmost importance and urgency. It is a large work of history that by recovering the past illuminates a future.

Katherine Baird, an economist, clearly spells out how our educational system is trapped in mediocrity. She points the direction to where we need to go to get out of the trap and carefully examines each factor that has lead to the current state in education.

This work looks at why many of America's schools are failing and relates how parents, activists, and education reformers are joining together to fix a system that works for adults but consistently fails the children it is meant to educate. In it the author takes a look at the adults who are fighting over America's failure to educate its children, and points the way to reversing that failure.

A passionate plea to preserve and renew public education, this work is a radical change of heart from one of America's best known education experts. The author, a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum, examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, she critiques today's most popular ideas for restructuring schools, including privatization, standardized testing, punitive accountability, and the feckless multiplication of charter schools. She shows conclusively why the business model is not an appropriate way to improve schools

What would a truly democratic, functional, and educationally productive system look like? How did we arrive at our current system? How can an informed public work to reshape the system equitably? How can educators partner with their broader communities? In this provocative book, renowned expert Evans Clinchy shows how we can revitalize American public education and build a new system that will serve all children, rich and poor, foreign or native-born. Everyone who cares about public education should read this inspiring book.

This text is designed to provide readers with the knowledge and understanding needed to make informed decisions about key educational issues in today's world and knowledge to not only shape their own personal professional growth but also the future of education.

Many Americans view today's problems in education as an unprecedented crisis brought on by contemporary social ills. In Learning from the Past a group of distinguished educational historians and scholars of public policy reminds us that many of our current difficulties - as well as recent reform efforts - have important historical antecedents. What can we learn, they ask, from nineteenth century efforts to promote early childhood education, or debates in the 1920s about universal secondary education, or the curriculum reforms of the 1950s? Reflecting a variety of intellectual and disciplinary orientations, the contributors to this volume examine major changes in educational development and reform and consider how such changes have been implemented in the past. They address questions of governance, equity and multiculturalism, curriculum standards, school choice, and a variety of other issues. Policy makers and other school reformers, they conclude, would do well to investigate the past in order to appreciate the implications of the present reform initiatives.

A book for all practitioners and all members of the greater community. Giroux demands reader involvement, transformation, and empowerment. He helps us understand that the political relationship between schools and society is neither artificial nor neutral nor necessarily negative. Rather, school personnel have a positive and dynamic political role to play.