Where exactly did high-stakes testing come from anyway? Neither parents, teachers, administrators, nor school boards demanded it, and now many communities feel powerless to reverse its appalling effect on our schools. Hot on the heels of the testing masterminds and peeling back layer upon layer of documentation, Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian found a familiar scent at the end of the paper trail. Corporate money. CEOs and American big business have blanketed United States public education officials with their influence and, as Emery and Ohanian prove, their fifteen year drive to undemocratize public education has yielded a many-tentacled private-public monster. With stunning clarity and meticulous research, Emery and Ohanian take you on a tour of board rooms, rightist think tanks, nonprofit concerned citizens groups, and governmental agencies to expose the real story of how current education reform arose, how its deceptive rhetoric belies its goals, and the true nature of its polarizing and disenfranchising mission. Why is corporate America bashing our schools? Because it's in their interestsnot yours. What can you do to promote your best educational interests? Read this expose and get ready to dismantle the education-reform machine.

"Despite measured success of American public schools, the media, politicians, and big business attack public schools and their teachers with inaccuracies that threaten the equal opportunities provided by public education. Research indicates that No Child Left Behind, charter schools, and vouchers do not improve students learning or help educators teach better. The book provide reasons to support American public schools and educators."--Provided by publisher.

At this moment, schools are doing everything they can to win the Race to the Top. They are allocating their funding to test preparation, riffing beloved teachers, and transferring students who “drag down” their grade average on the state report card. This book describes the current state of the education system in the United States. Readers will be on the front lines of the protests in Madison, in the inner city public-turned-charter schools, and in the shoes of the teachers dealing with educational politics every day. By the end of this text, you may beg the question: who’s winning in the Race to the Top?

At the start of the twenty-first century, government mandates and corporate practices are resulting in growing inequities in the U.S. educational field. Many view this as being driven by whiteness hegemony. Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom is a comprehensive effort to bring together, in one volume, educultural practices and teaching strategies that deconstruct whiteness hegemony, empower individuals to develop critical consciousness, and inspire them to engage in social justice activism. Through music, the visual and performing arts, narrative, and dialogue, educulturalism opens us up to becoming more aware of the oppressive cultural and institutional forces that make up whiteness hegemony. Educulturalism allows us to identify how whiteness hegemony functions to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite, and reproduce inequities and inequalities within education and wider society.

This inspiring author moves beyond criticism of public education, uniting readers toward a vision of educating children that is holistic, intelligent, and empowering. Written for parents, teachers, administrators, students, and policymakers committed to children and change, this book offers better alternatives to high-stakes testing. Vivid classroom stories show how education is enriched through individual personal attention-not uniformity. Engel introduces novel school collaborative accountability models ensuring academic integrity and excellence on behalf of students, teachers, and our communities. Uniquely engaging and surprisingly entertaining, Engel's combination of storytelling and research findings offers a comprehensive guide to cultivating future generations of problem solvers and leaders.

This reader demands that we understand diversity and multiculturalism by identifying the ways in which curriculum has been written and taught, and by redefining the field with an equitable lens, freeing it from the dominant cultural curriculum. The book problematizes the issue of whiteness, for instance, as not being the opposite of blackness or «person-of-colorness», but rather a meta-description for our dominant culture. Issues are also addressed that are usually left out of the discussion about diversity and multiculturalism: this reader includes essays on physical diversity, geographic diversity, and difference in sexualities. This is the quintessential collection of work by critical scholars committed to redefining the conversation on multiculturalism and diversity.

Warns of a future where the hardest schools for Australian parents to get their kids into will be public ones. With insight, passion and a sense of urgency, this book shows how government, anxious parents, the church and ideology are combining to undermine public schools.

Many new approaches to school improvement are being proposed in the current climate of assessment and school accountability. This book explores one of these approaches, a new model of leadership training known as Learner-Centered Leadership (LCL). It is built around the fundamental idea that learning and learning communities are natural processes that, when properly harnessed, can lead to the highest levels of professional engagement and problem solving. Key features of this exciting new approach to school leadership include the following: Broad-based and Generative—The book’s narratives vividly illustrate the extraordinary ability of LCL to generate new approaches to leadership development. For example, encouraging and assisting school leaders to reflect on their own leadership attributes relative to the implementation of the school mission to ensure high teacher efficacy and student learning. In this respect the volume contributes significantly to the field of school leadership and professional development by extending above and beyond a narrow focus on instructional leadership. Practice Oriented—By creating communities that encourage conversation and analysis the new data-driven models of school improvement are more likely to be successfully implemented. Without analytical discourse, the process of interpreting school data and transforming it into practice would be largely lost. Conceptually Appropriate—The realization that everyone within a school (students, teachers, administrators) belongs to the same learning community minimizes status differences and encourages teamwork. The LCL administrator is much less likely to be authoritarian and power-oriented and much more likely to be transformative and student outcome focused. This book is appropriate for master’s level courses and certification seminars, and for inservice workshops dealing with school leadership.

Advancing a three-fold political agenda, this volume: * illuminates how the meanings assigned to a whole vocabulary of words and phrases frequently used to discuss the role and reform of U.S. public schools reflect an essentially economic view of the world; * contends that education or educational reform conducted under an economized worldview will only intensify the effects of the colonial relations of political and economic domination that it breeds at home and abroad; and * offers a set of alternative concepts and meanings for reformulating the role of U.S. public schools and for considering the implications of such a reformulation more generally for the underlying premises of all human relationships and activities. Toward these ends, the authors, in Part I, critically examine many of the most commonly used terms within the rhetoric of educational reform since the early 1980s and before. Part II links today's economized worldview to curricular and instructional issues. These essays are especially important for comprehending how the organization of school curriculum privileges those disciplines deemed most central to market expansion--math and science--and how the political centrality of the economic sphere influences the nature of the knowledge presented in specific content areas. Given that language constrains as well as advances human thought, the twin tasks of de-economizing education and decolonizing society will require a vocabulary that transcends the familiar terminologies addressed in Parts I and II. The entries in Part III cultivate the beginnings of such a vocabulary as the authors elucidate innovative concepts which they view as central to the creation of truly alternative educational visions and practices.

Leading Beautifully provides a new dimension to understanding effective leadership. Drawing from lessons in the arts and the humanities, English and Ehrich explore how educational decision-making in schools can be informed by identity, personal competence, and an understanding of the field’s intellectual foundations. Based on in-depth interviews of artists and educational leaders, this book provides insight into the inner world of successful leaders who have developed competencies and understandings that extend beyond the standard leadership tool box. This exciting new book explores the theory and practice of leadership connoisseurship as a human-centered endeavor and as an antidote to mechanistic, business-oriented practices. The authors’ well-grounded reconsideration of educational leadership will enliven and enhance any educational leader’s practice.