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Policy Patrons offers a rare behind-the-scenes view of decision making inside four influential education philanthropies: the Ford Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The outcome is an intriguing, thought-provoking look at the impact of current philanthropic efforts on education. Over a period of several years, Megan E. Tompkins-Stange gained the trust of key players and outside observers of these four organizations. Through a series of confidential interviews, she began to explore the values, ideas, and beliefs that inform these foundations’ strategies and practices. The picture that emerges reveals important differences in the strategies and values of the more established foundations vis-à-vis the newer, more activist foundations—differences that have a significant impact on education policy and practice, and have important implications for democratic decision making. In recent years, the philanthropic sector has played an increasing role in championing and financing education reform. Policy Patrons makes an original and invaluable contribution to contemporary discussions about the appropriate role of foundations in public policy and the future direction of education reform.
This is essential reading for any school leader, education reformer, policymaker, or citizen interested in the forces that promote school change. "Giving test results to an incoherent, badly run school doesn't automatically make it a better school. The work of turning a school around entails improving the knowledge and skills of teachers-changing their knowledge of content and how to teach it-and helping them to understand where their students are in their academic development. Low-performing schools, and the people who work in them, don't know what to do. If they did, they would be doing it already." So writes Richard Elmore in "Unwarranted Intrusion," an essay critiquing the accountability mandates and high-stakes testing policies of the No Child Left Behind Act. In School Reform from the Inside Out, one of the country's leading experts on the successes and failures of American education policy tackles issues ranging from teacher development to testing to "failing" schools. As Elmore aptly notes, successful school reform begins "from the inside out" with teachers, administrators, and school staff, not with external mandates or standards.
Written in an accessible style, the papers in this volume document and analyse particular components of the Children First reforms, including governance, community engagement, finance, accountability, and instruction. Aimed at instituting evidence-based practices to produce higher and more equitable outcomes for all students, the policies that comprise the Children First initiative represent an attempt at organisational improvement and systemic learning.
Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay offers a timely analysis of professional dissatisfaction that challenges the common explanation of burnout. Featuring the voices of educators, the book offers concrete lessons for practitioners, school leaders, and policy makers on how to think more strategically to retain experienced teachers and make a difference in the lives of students. Based on ten years of research and interviews with practitioners across the United States, the book theorizes the existence of a “moral center” that can be pivotal in guiding teacher actions and expectations on the job. Education philosopher Doris Santoro argues that demoralization offers a more precise diagnosis that is born out of ongoing value conflicts with pedagogical policies, reform mandates, and school practices. Demoralized reveals that this condition is reversible when educators are able to tap into authentic professional communities and shows that individuals can help themselves. Detailed stories from veteran educators are included to illustrate the variety of contexts in which demoralization can occur. Based on these insights, Santoro offers an array of recommendations and promising strategies for how school leaders, union leaders, teacher groups, and individual practitioners can enact and support “re-moralization” by working to change the conditions leading to demoralization.
Water policy initiatives often run into difficulties when they encounter the realities of really existing societies. Policies may not get implemented as planned, and may not achieve their stated objectives. Many things happen when policy initiatives travel from formulation to implementation. The papers in this volume examine the travel and appropriation of water policy by looking at the contestation and the embeddedness of water policy. Organised in the sequence everyday politics of water, politics of water policy, hydropolitics, global water politics, the papers constitute a call for a policy approach that replaces a social engineering with a strategic action perspective.
"California Crackup is brilliant. It cuts through the familiar tangle of diagnoses and quick-fix solutions to provide a comprehensive and persuasive analysis of California's dysfunctional governmental system. Paul and Mathews have coolly laid out a complicated story, made it readable, sometimes even comedic. It is the best discussion of the issue I've seen in over three decades."--Peter Schrag, author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment "I know of no other work that combines so succinctly and enjoyably a historical summary of California's existing problems with such a sweeping and provocative program of reform."--Ethan Rarick, University of California, Berkeley "Mark Paul and Joe Mathews have produced an indispensable guide to California's crisis of governance--and they have done so with humor, scholarship, fairness and storytelling verve. Every Californian should read this book."--Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars "Mark Paul... has a talent for presenting California Big Think stuff in an easily accessible and always readable way...[offering] clear and creative insights on the subject of California's collapse."--CalBuzz "Joe Mathews has done an artful, fascinating, and convincing job of connecting the California of today's Schwarzenegger era to the long history that made his rise possible.--James Fallows,The Atlantic Monthly on Mathews' book, The People's Machine
This book offers an ambitious new system for evaluating, compensating, and providing professional development for school teachers and administrators. In this realigned system, new forms of accountability are introduced, but they go hand in hand with new rewards and access to enhanced forms of professional development. A bold and comprehensive plan that includes contributions from many leading researchers, A Grand Bargain for Education Reform is a crucial contribution to contemporary debates about education and the challenges it must meet in the twenty-first century. "This timely volume responds to President Obama's call for a renewed focus on teacher effectiveness as a central component of education reform. With thoughtful contributions from many prominent educators, it offers a range of ideas for improving teacher compensation, professional development, and accountability in our nation's schools." -- Representative George Miller, D-CA, chairman, House Education and Labor Committee, U.S. House of Representatives "A Grand Bargain for Education Reform advocates for increasing the professionalism of teaching by working with educators as full partners in school improvement. Although I don't agree with every recommendation in the framework, the substance of focused professional development, improving teacher evaluation, enhancing career opportunities for teachers who remain in the classroom, and differentiating compensation offers educational leaders an innovative path to improved teaching and learning." -- Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO "Considerable consensus has been built around the notion that a high quality teacher is the single-most important factor in a child's education. A Grand Bargain for Education Reform moves the discussion to the next level, proposing new ways to evaluate and compensate the men and women who play such a crucial role in determining the fate of modern school reform efforts." -- Joe Williams, director, Democrats for Education Reform "A perceptive educator focuses on the critical step to better schools: paying teachers more for teaching well." -- Lamar Alexander, U.S. Secretary of Education (1991-1993) "This book offers a dynamic collection of authors, whose combined experience and expertise is unmatched. Their collective message makes this book a good blueprint that school communities can use to build systems that will lead to great success for schools and children." -- Gerald L. Zahorchak, Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Theodore Hershberg is a professor of public policy and history and director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of Operation Public Education. Claire Robertson-Kraft is associate director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia and of Operation Public Education, and a former elementary school teacher.
This book describes how different nations have defined the core competencies and skills that young people will need in order to thrive in the twenty-first-century, and how those nations have fashioned educational policies and curricula meant to promote those skills. The book examines six countries—Chile, China, India, Mexico, Singapore, and the United States—exploring how each one defines, supports, and cultivates those competencies that students will need in order to succeed in the current century. Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century appears at a time of heightened attention to comparative studies of national education systems, and to international student assessments such as those that have come out of PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment), led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This book’s crucial contribution to the burgeoning field of international education arises out of its special attention to first principles—and thus to first questions: As Reimers and Chung explain, “much can be gained by an explicit investigation of the intended purposes of education, in what they attempt to teach students, and in the related questions of why those purposes and how they are achieved.” These questions are crucial to education practice and reform at a time when educators (and the students they serve) face unique, pressing challenges. The book’s detailed attention to such questions signals its indispensable value for policy makers, scholars, and education leaders today.
