Examines American student performance, the effectiveness of such education alternatives as voucher programs and charter schools, and the issues that surround school choice.

This book will present a comprehensive examination of the latest school reform effort, the charter school movement. For anyone seriously interested in school reform & the charter school movement, including teachers, principals, & college educ faculty.

Named one of the Ten Best Books about New York City by the New York Times

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.

An acclaimed portrait of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the origins of modern conservatism and liberalism In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Striving to forge a new political path in the tumultuous age of the American and French revolutions, these two ideological titans sparred over moral and philosophical questions about the nature of political life and the best approach to social change: radical and swift, or gradual and incremental. The division they articulated continues to shape our political life today. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the basis of our political order and Washington's acrimonious rifts today, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, progressivism, and the debate between them truly amount to.

A bitter debate erupted in 1834 between Orientalists and Anglicists over what kind of public education the British should promote in their growing Indian empire. This collection of the main documents pertaining to the controversy (some published for the first time) aims to recover the major British and South Asian voices, broaden our understanding of imperial discourses and recognise the significant role of the colonised in the shaping of colonial knowledge. Bringing together into a single volume documents not easily obtained - long out of print, never before published, or scattered about in sundry books and journals - enables modern readers to judge the relative merits of the various arguments and undermines the common impression that the controversy was simply an exercise in colonial power involving only Europeans.

Somewhere. . . there is a place of sanity where education is intense and substantive. . . . It's in that place that Deborah Meier has been working all these years. Her voice conveys a life of struggle in the front lines-victories and losses, hopes and disappointments. . . . It's a voice our nation needs to hear. --Jonathan Kozol, from the Foreword Acclaimed educator Deborah Meier offers a fresh take on standardized tests. While others have criticized standards and what they measure, Meier rejects the very idea of a centralized authority that dictates how and what teachers teach. Standardization, she argues, prevents citizens-including teachers-from emerging as thoughtful, responsible adults, seriously engaged with shaping their own schools, classrooms, and communities. As a result, young people can't learn from them how to be thoughtful, responsible adults and good citizens, the primary goal of public education in a democracy. The New Democracy Forum is a series of short paperback originals exploring creative solutions to our most urgent national concerns. "A civic treasure. . . . A truly good idea, carried out with intelligence and panache." --Robert Pinsky

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools. “[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.

Since the early twentieth century, American educators have been engaged in a heated debate over what schools should teach and how they should teach it. The partisans—"education progressives" and "education traditionalists"—have usually kept their disagreements within the walls of the nation's schools of education. Periodically, however, arguments have erupted which have generated headlines and attracted public attention, making clear the potential for bitterness and rancor in education politics. In the 1990s, progressives and traditionalists squared off in a dispute over reading and mathematics. Arguments over how best to teach these two subjects is detailed in The Great Curriculum Debate: How Should We Teach Reading and Math? This book includes contributions from distinguished scholars from both sides of the debate, as well as influential nonpartisans. The proponents of "whole language" and "phonics" present their opposing views on reading. Advocates and opponents of "NCTM math reform"—the agenda of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)—discuss their differing opinions about math. Although the authors disagree on many of the most important aspects of learning, they agree on one point: the school curriculum matters. Decisions made now about the content of reading and mathematics will have long term consequences, not only for students and schools, but for society as a whole. Contributors include E. D. Hirsch Jr. (University of Virginia), Gail Burrill (Mathematical Sciences Education Board), Michael T. Battista (Kent State University), David C. Geary (University of Missouri, Columbia), Roger Shouse (Penn State University), Adam Gamoran (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Richard Askey (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Diane Ravitch (New York University), Catherine E. Snow (Harvard University), Margaret Moustafa (California State University, LA), Richard L. Allington (University of Florida), William Lowe Boyd (Penn State University), a