This book examines case studies of eight public and eight private schools that investigated different identifiable and transferable private school practices that public schools could adopt to improve student outcomes. Data came from interviews with administrators, teachers, parents, and students from diverse schools. Chapter 1, "Accountability to Parents," discusses resistance to parents, structural limits to parent accountability, managing participation at parochial schools, lower-income parent participation, cases of formal accountability to parents, and observations about accountability to parents. Chapter 2, "Clarity of Goals and Expectations," discusses the religious character of parochial schools, broader educational goals versus testable outcomes, anchoring expectations in scripture, and clarity of goals. Chapter 3, "Behavioral and Value Objectives," discusses different approaches to discipline and the teaching of ethical and religious values in public and private schools. Chapter 4, "Clear Standards for Teacher Selection and Retention," includes faculty collegiality, hiring standards and teacher quality, formal and informal teacher evaluation, teacher retention and dismissal, and observations on selection and retention. Chapter 5, "Similarity of Curriculum Materials," discusses formal curricular similarities. Chapter 6 discusses "Competitive Improvements." Chapter 7, "Conclusions," suggests that similarities between public and private schools and the problems they face outweigh the differences. Differences are determined mainly by parent socioeconomic and cultural factors. Case study descriptions are appended. (Contains 17 references.) (SM)

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Quality education starts and ends with competent and knowledgeable instruction. Today’s students demand that educational programs be informative and challenging. With accreditation of EMS programs on the horizon—and the mandate that instructors develop their own teaching materials, not simply use “canned” materials off the shelf—EMS instructors need clear, detailed direction on course design and tools to enhance their courses. Instructional Methods for Public Safety offers a broad-spectrum view of the latest educational trends and cutting-edge information on emergency services instruction. Based on the current National Guidelines for Educating EMS Instructors by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and encompassing the recommendations of the EMS Education Standards, this resource offers new and experienced instructors concise guidance on the development of high-quality, interactive educational and assessment tools.

Organized around eleven fundamental choices that all secondary schools must make, this book serves as a checklist, an agenda, and a study guide for high school reform.

Access issues are pivotal to almost all charter school tensions and debates. How well are these schools performing? Are they segregating and stratifying? Are they public and democratic? Are they fairly funded? Can apparent successes be scaled up? Answers to all these core questions hinge on how access to charter schools is shaped. This book describes the incentives and pressures on charter schools to restrict access and examines how charters navigate those pressures, explaining access-restricting practices in relation to the ecosystem within which charter schools are created. It also explains how charters have sometimes responded by resisting the pressures and sometimes by surrendering to them. The text presents analyses of 13 different types of practices around access, each of which shapes the school’s enrollment. The authors conclude by offering recommendations for how states and authorizers can address access-related inequities that arise in the charter sector. School’s Choice provides timely information on critical academic and policy issues that will come into play as charter school policy continues to evolve. Book Features: Examines how charter schools control who gains and retains access.Explores policies and practices that undermine equitable admission and encourage opportunity hoarding.Offers a set of policy recommendations at the state and federal level to address access-related issues.

Seldom is the practicing P-12 educator, the P-12 practitioner, considered a scholar. R.A.C.E. Mentoring and P-12 Educators: Practitioners Contributing to Scholarship explores the unrecognized and infrequently considered teacher scholar, principal scholar, counselor scholar, librarian scholar - the practitioner scholar who if provided the platform and access can produce a unique and complex narrative and knowledge base to fields of study. This volume extends the current Research, Advocacy, Collaboration, and Empowerment (R.A.C.E.) knowledge in educational leadership, theory and practice, curriculum and instruction, teaching and teacher development, social justice, and diversity, equity and inclusion. R.A.C.E. Mentoring and P-12 Educators: Practitioners Contributing to Scholarship presents ways to conceptualize quality in educational research by engaging practitioners, researchers and policy makers in cross-disciplinary partnerships to provide an intentional platform for scholars and researchers in the P-12 school systems and pre-service programs, particularly those with/or seeking an active and emerging research and publishing agenda. This volume is divided into four interrelated sections. Section I focuses on mentoring practitioners as scholars during pre-service and in practice. Chapters in this section promote the use of methods coursework, narrative analysis and culturally relevant pedagogy to enhance practitioner agency and roles as scholars. Section II includes Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) as a way to recognize and address the historical examples and barriers to practitioner social justice activism. These chapters center the school setting and graduate coursework, using practitioner scholarship as a way to cultivate critical consciousness and the use of counter-narratives to combat racism, settler colonialism, and classism among school staff. Section III engages practitioner scholarship as a revolutionary approach through case study, auto-ethnography, review of literature, mental models, and phenomenological study. This section fosters the value of practitioner voice as agency to disrupt oppressive ideologies and beliefs that sustain inequitable and unequal school environments. Section IV provides curriculum, instruction, and parent involvement as examples of practitioner advocacy via personal and collective identity development, Black/Crit, Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) and engagement strategies. These final chapters provide details of policy and practice transformation methods that empower practitioner sustainability of student and parent access to equitable and inclusive school experiences.

Physical inactivity is a key determinant of health across the lifespan. A lack of activity increases the risk of heart disease, colon and breast cancer, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, osteoporosis, anxiety and depression and others diseases. Emerging literature has suggested that in terms of mortality, the global population health burden of physical inactivity approaches that of cigarette smoking. The prevalence and substantial disease risk associated with physical inactivity has been described as a pandemic. The prevalence, health impact, and evidence of changeability all have resulted in calls for action to increase physical activity across the lifespan. In response to the need to find ways to make physical activity a health priority for youth, the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Physical Activity and Physical Education in the School Environment was formed. Its purpose was to review the current status of physical activity and physical education in the school environment, including before, during, and after school, and examine the influences of physical activity and physical education on the short and long term physical, cognitive and brain, and psychosocial health and development of children and adolescents. Educating the Student Body makes recommendations about approaches for strengthening and improving programs and policies for physical activity and physical education in the school environment. This report lays out a set of guiding principles to guide its work on these tasks. These included: recognizing the benefits of instilling life-long physical activity habits in children; the value of using systems thinking in improving physical activity and physical education in the school environment; the recognition of current disparities in opportunities and the need to achieve equity in physical activity and physical education; the importance of considering all types of school environments; the need to take into consideration the diversity of students as recommendations are developed. This report will be of interest to local and national policymakers, school officials, teachers, and the education community, researchers, professional organizations, and parents interested in physical activity, physical education, and health for school-aged children and adolescents.

Discusses how school choice, misapplied standards of accountability, the No Child Left Behind mandate, and the use of a corporate model have all led to a decline in public education and presents arguments for a return to strong neighborhood schools and quality teaching.

This book examines the fundamental role of politics in funding our public schools and fills a conceptual imbalance in the current literature in school finance and educational policy. Unlike those who are primarily concerned about cost efficiency, Kenneth Wong specifies how resources are allocated for what purposes at different levels of the government. In contrast to those who focus on litigation as a way to reduce funding gaps, he underscores institutional stalemate and the lack of political will to act as important factors that affect legislative deadlock in school finance reform. Wong defines how politics has sustained various types of "rules" that affect the allocation of resources at the federal, state, and local level. While these rules have been remarkably stable over the past twenty to thirty years, they have often worked at cross-purposes by fragmenting policy and constraining the education process at schools with the greatest needs. Wong's examination is shaped by several questions. How do these rules come about? What role does politics play in retention of the rules? Do the federal, state, and local governments espouse different policies? In what ways do these policies operate at cross-purposes? How do they affect educational opportunities? Do the policies cohere in ways that promote better and more equitable student outcomes? Wong concludes that the five types of entrenched rules for resource allocation are rooted in existing governance arrangements and seemingly impervious to partisan shifts, interest group pressures, and constitutional challenge. And because these rules foster policy fragmentation and embody initiatives out of step with the performance-based reform agenda of the 1990s, the outlook for positive change in public education is uncertain unless fairly radical approaches are employed. Wong also analyzes four allocative reform models, two based on the assumption that existing political structures are unlikely to change and two that seek to empower actors at the school level. The two models for systemwide restructuring, aimed at intergovernmental coordination and/or integrated governance, would seek to clarify responsibilities for public education among federal, state, and local authorities-above all, integrating political and educational accountability. The other two models identified by Wong shift control from state and district to the school, one based on local leadership and the other based on market forces. In discussing the guiding principles of the four models, Wong takes care to identify both the potential and limitations of each. Written with a broad policy audience in mind, Wong's book should appeal to professionals interested in the politics of educational reform and to teachers of courses dealing with educational policy and administration and intergovernmental relations.