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For more than a decade, school choice has been a flashpoint in debates about our nation's schooling. Perhaps the most commonly advanced argument for school choice is the notion that markets will force public schools to improve, particularly in those urban areas where improvement has proved so elusive. However, the question of how public schools respond to market conditions has received surprisingly little attention. Revolution at the Margins examines the impact of school vouchers and charter schooling on three urban school districts, explores the causes of the behavior observed, and explains how the structure of competition is likely to shape the way it affects the future of public education...
This volume draws upon the best available research to examine the various education policy alternatives that will close the black-white achievement gap by 2028_the year when the Supreme Court has mandated that affirmative action in college admissions will end.
Few Americans are aware that their nation long ago created a separate government for education, supposedly to shield it from political interference. Some experts believe that at the heart of todays school debates is a push to put the larger government-- presidents, governors, mayors-- in the drivers seat, or even to dump democratic school governance entirely. The results are mixed. One clear result, however, is a vexing tangle of authority and accountability. "Whos in Charge Here?" untangles it all.
School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only ...
Local school boards have traditionally assigned the school that a child is to attend. Only by selecting their neighborhoods have parents exercised their choice of school. In recent years, this tradition has slowly given way to magnet schools, inter-district choice programs, charter schools, voucher programs, and many other forms of choice, creating a new environment for school decision making. At the same time, market concepts are under consideration for the recruitment and compensation of teachers and principals. As a result, the world of education is becoming more competitive. In a group of essays originally published in Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research, this book examines the likely promise and pitfalls of these changes in American education. Overall, these essays paint the picture of an education landscape that will be greatly shaped by choice and competition in the 21st century.
This book presents a bold, unconventional plan to rescue our nation's schoolchildren from a failing public education system. The plan reflects the author's rare fusion of on-the-ground experience as school board member, public administrator and political activist and exhaustive policy research. The causes of failure, Hettleman shows, lie in obsolete ideas and false certainties that are ingrained in a trinity of dominant misbeliefs. First, that educators can be entrusted on their own to do what it takes to reform our schools. Second, that we need to retreat from the landmark federal No Child Left Behind Act and restore more local control. And third, that politics must be kept out of public education.
American schools have always been locally created and controlled. But ever since the Title I program in 1965 appropriated nearly one billion dollars for public schools, federal money and programs have been influencing every school in America. What has been accomplished in this extraordinary assertion of federal influence? What hasn't? Why not? With incisive clarity and wit, David Cohen and Susan Moffitt argue that enormous gaps existed between policies and programs, and the real-world practices that they attempted to change. Learning and teaching are complicated and mysterious. So the means to achieve admirable goals are uncertain, and difficult to develop and sustain, particularly when teac...
America is now in the second generation of debate on school choice. The first was prompted by the provocative voucher proposal conceived by Milton Friedman in 1955 and brought into the mainstream by Chubb and Moe's seminal book Politics, Markets, and American Schools (Brookings, 1990). It introduced a pure market model in which schools would be publicly financed but privately operated. While opponents continue to contend that choice will lead to the demise of public education, the weakening of civil society, and the fostering of separate and unequal systems of education, Joseph P. Viteritti argues that these long-held assertions must give way to present realities. The rich and diverse experi...
(Published in cooperation with The Center on Innovation & Improvement) As suggested by the title, the purpose of this Handbook on Restructuring and Substantial School Improvement is to provide principles for restructuring and substantially improving schools. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the Center on Innovation & Improvement (CII) engaged leading experts on restructuring and school improvement to prepare modules for this handbook to assist states, districts, and schools in establishing policies, procedures, and support to successfully restructure schools. The Handbook is organized into three sections. The topic of the Handbook’s modules – restructuring with a focus on the district as the impetus for dramatic improvement – is relatively new in the nation’s education history. For this reason, the module authors were selected because they are highly experienced experts in their fields and can be counted on to judiciously weigh the less than definitive evidence and to state useful guiding principles.
The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship examines the challenge of creating innovative and productive entrepreneurial activity in American education. In the course of exploring these challenges, the book considers a number of crucial issues and circumstances: existing “barriers to entry” that prohibit or obstruct entrepreneurial efforts; the availability—and frequent lack—of venture capital for fueling entrepreneurial activities; the effort to sponsor and create a sufficiently large population of talented educational entrepreneurs; and questions about research, development, and quality control in the burgeoning entrepreneurial sector. A field that is likely to grow in size and importance in the years to come, educational entrepreneurship receives much-needed attention, analysis, and elucidation in this lively, wide-ranging book.