"What year are you preparing your students for? 1973? 1995? Can you honestly say that your school's curriculum and the program you use are preparing your students for 2015 or 2020? Are you even preparing them for today?" With those provocative questions, author and educator Heidi Hayes Jacobs launches a powerful case for overhauling, updating, and injecting life into the K-12 curriculum. Sharing her expertise as a world-renowned curriculum designer and calling upon the collective wisdom of 10 education thought leaders, Jacobs provides insight and inspiration in the following key areas: * Content and assessment: How to identify what to keep, what to cut, and what to create, and where portfolios and other new kinds of assessment fit into the picture. * Program structures: How to improve our use of time and space and groupings of students and staff. * Technology: How it's transforming teaching, and how to take advantage of students' natural facility with technology. * Media literacy: The essential issues to address, and the best resources for helping students become informed users of multiple forms of media. * Globalization: What steps to take to help students gain a global perspective. * Sustainability: How to instill enduring values and beliefs that will lead to healthier local, national, and global communities. * Habits of mind: The thinking habits that students, teachers, and administrators need to develop and practice to succeed in school, work, and life. The answers to these questions and many more make Curriculum 21 the ideal guide for transforming our schools into what they must become: learning organizations that match the times in which we live.

Throughout the United States, increasing numbers of students are being educated in charter schools. Although the educators in these schools may think they are prepared to tackle any problem related to teaching and learning, personnel, financial management, and community relations, many charter schools are overwhelmed by the need for complying with federal rules and regulations while at the same time meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse population―most notably those students with disabilities. In Charting the Course, Addie Angelov and David Bateman provide readers with a background in essential aspects of delivering special education services in this unique educational setting. Developed in collaboration with prominent charter school organizations and with the support of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education.

"Dr. von Rohr is a force in charter schools in the United States" Joan Lange, National Schools Director, The Challenge Foundation. "Dr. von Rohr's Spartanburg Preparatory School exemplifies the original ideals of the charter school movement. His dedication and leadership have led to the school ranking near the top in statewide academics while the funding is near the bottom." Dr. Wayne Brazell, Superintendent, South Carolina Public Charter School District

From David Osborne, the author of Reinventing Government--a biting analysis of the failure of America's public schools and a comprehensive plan for revitalizing American education. In Reinventing America's Schools, David Osborne, one of the world's foremost experts on public sector reform, offers a comprehensive analysis of the charter school movements and presents a theory that will do for American schools what his New York Times bestseller Reinventing Government did for public governance in 1992. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city got an unexpected opportunity to recreate their school system from scratch. The state's Recovery School District (RSD), created to turn around failing schools, gradually transformed all of its New Orleans schools into charter schools, and the results are shaking the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, ACT scores, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: the city's RSD schools have tripled their effectiveness in eight years. Now other cities are following suit, with state governments reinventing failing schools in Newark, Camden, Memphis, Denver, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Oakland. In this book, Osborne uses compelling stories from cities like New Orleans and lays out the history and possible future of public education. Ultimately, he uses his extensive research to argue that in today's world, we should treat every public school like a charter school and grant them autonomy, accountability, diversity of school designs, and parental choice.

How charter schools have taken hold in three cities—and why parents, teachers, and community members are fighting back Charter schools once promised a path towards educational equity, but as the authors of this powerful volume show, market-driven education reforms have instead boldly reestablished a tiered public school system that segregates students by race and class. Examining the rise of charters in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, authors Raynard Sanders, David Stovall, and Terrenda White show how charters—private institutions, usually set in poor or working-class African American and Latinx communities—promote competition instead of collaboration and are driven chiefly by financial interests. Sanders, Stovall, and White also reveal how corporate charters position themselves as “public” to secure tax money but exploit their private status to hide data about enrollment and salaries, using misleading information to promote false narratives of student success. In addition to showing how charter school expansion can deprive students of a quality education, the authors document several other lasting consequences of charter school expansion: • the displacement of experienced African American teachers • the rise of a rigid, militarized pedagogy such as SLANT • the purposeful starvation of district schools • and the loss of community control and oversight A revealing and illuminating look at one of the greatest threats to public education, Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools explores how charter schools have shaped the educational landscape and why parents, teachers, and community members are fighting back.

Can charter schools save public education? This radical question has unleashed a flood of opinions from Americans struggling with the contentious challenges of education reform. There has been plenty of heat over charter schools and their implications, but, until now, not much light. This important new book supplies plenty of illumination. Charter schools--independently operated public schools of choice--have existed in the United States only since 1992, yet there are already over 1,500 of them. How are they doing? Here prominent education analysts Chester Finn, Bruno Manno, and Gregg Vanourek offer the richest data available on the successes and failures of this exciting but controversial approach to education reform. After studying one hundred schools, interviewing hundreds of participants, surveying thousands more, and analyzing the most current data, they have compiled today's most authoritative, comprehensive explanation and appraisal of the charter phenomenon. Fact-filled, clear-eyed, and hard-hitting, this is the book for anyone concerned about public education and interested in the role of charter schools in its renewal. Can charter schools boost student achievement, drive educational innovation, and develop a new model of accountability for public schools? Where did the idea of charter schools come from? What would the future hold if this phenomenon spreads? These are some of the questions that this book answers. It addresses pupil performance, enrollment patterns, school start-up problems, charges of inequity, and smoldering political battles. It features close-up looks at five real--and very different--charter schools and two school districts that have been deeply affected by the charter movement, including their setbacks and triumphs. After outlining a new model of education accountability and describing how charter schools often lead to community renewal, the authors take the reader on an imaginary tour of a charter-based school system. Charter schools are the most vibrant force in education today. This book suggests that their legacy will consist not only of helping millions of families obtain a better education for their children but also in renewing American public education itself.

This book opens up a critical conversation among progressive educators of various generations, races, perspectives, and social locations concerning one specific school reform initiative—charter schools. Eric Rofes and Lisa M. Stulberg bring together scholars who both study and actively participate in school choice reform and charge them to be "bold in their questioning and assertive in their own ambivalence" about this complex, controversial public issue and to include issues that are underexamined in the school literature, such as the impact of school choice on race and class politics and inequalities. The editors argue that charter schools are playing a powerful role in reviving participation in public education, expanding opportunities for progressive methods in public school classrooms, and generating new energy for community-based, community-controlled school initiatives. The result is a groundbreaking volume that pushes boundaries, questions assumptions, and rocks foundations of progressive thought.

In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

Charters are by nature different not just from traditional public schools, but from one another. With their freedom and flexibility, some charter schools have opened doors and opportunities for many poor minority children who were previously trapped at failing campuses run by school district bureaucracies. These successful charter schools have perfected alternative models of organization, management, and discipline that shatter the status-quo orthodoxy. In Free to Learn, successful charter principals and teachers - who often do things contrary to the public education establishment - offer hope and practical advice for the charter movement. After Hurricane Katrina, Free to Learn served as an inspiration and handbook for charter school administrators in New Orleans.