Education Reform

When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools - and to solve the education crisis in every city in America - it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their plans soon ran into a constituency not so easily moved - Newark's key education players, fiercely protective of their billion-dollar-per-annum system.

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In his important new book, Five Miles Away, a World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia - one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day.

Over the past decade, educational instruction has become increasingly digitized as districts rush to dole out laptops and iPads to every student. Yet the most important question, “Is this what is best for students?” is glossed over. Veteran teachers Joe Clement and Matt Miles have seen firsthand how damaging technology overuse and misuse has been to our kids. On a mission to educate and empower parents, they show how screen saturation at home and school has created a wide range of cognitive and social deficits in our young people.

On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?

Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for 100 years.

Spätestens seit Lockdown und Schulausfall hinterfragen Eltern den Sinn vieler Maßnahmen rund um Schule und Kindeswohl. Zu Recht. Psychotherapeutin Gunda Frey warnt: "Wir erschaffen eine traumatisierte Generation!" Kinder werden heute von Geburt bis Schulabschluss den Zwängen eines auf "Funktionieren" optimierten Systems ausgesetzt - Rücksichtnahme auf ihre Bedürfnisse: meist Fehlanzeige! Das Ergebnis: Kinder, denen Eltern, Erzieher und Lehrer nicht das ermöglichen, was gut, gesund und nötig wäre. Die Resultate sind fatal.

Locus of Authority argues that every issue facing today's colleges and universities, from stagnant degree completion rates to worrisome cost increases, is exacerbated by a century-old system of governance that desperately requires change. While prior studies have focused on boards of trustees and presidents, few have looked at the place of faculty within the governance system.

“The nation needs to be confronted with the crime that we’re committing and the promises we are betraying. This is a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to defend themselves. It is not intended to make readers comfortable.” Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has...

Chezare A. Warren chronicles the transition of a cohort of young Black males from Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men to their early experiences in higher education. A rich and closely observed account of a mission-driven school and its students, Urban Preparation makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how young males of color can best be served in schools throughout the United States today.

In Testing Education, Kathy Greeley recounts the impact of education reform from a teacher's point of view. Based on a teaching career ranging nearly forty years, Greeley details how schools went from learning communities infused with excitement, intellectual stimulation, and joy to sterile spaces of stress, intimidation, and fear. In this ultimately hopeful memoir, Greeley asks us to learn from the past to reimagine the future of public education.

For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But nearly five million young people experience entry into adulthood as abrupt abandonment, a time of disconnection from school, work, and family. For this growing population of Americans, which includes kids aging out of foster care and those entangled with the justice system, life screeches to a halt when adulthood arrives. Abandoned is the first-ever exploration of this tale of dead ends and broken dreams.

El COVID-19 ha confinado en un mismo espacio la vida personal y laboral. Sin embargo, de momento la mayoría estamos trabajando desde casa, algo muy distinto al teletrabajo. Nos hemos visto obligados a improvisar y hacer malabares entre el trabajo y lo demás, cosa que se complica cuando además debemos lidiar con el estrés y las preocupaciones o cuidar de la familia.

What is the value of a college degree? The four-year college experience is as American as apple pie. So is the belief that higher education offers a ticket to a better life. But with student-loan debt surpassing the $1 trillion mark and unemployment of college graduates at historic highs, people are beginning to question that value. In College (Un)Bound, Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor at large of the Chronicle of Higher Education, argues that America’s higher education system is broken.

El presente libro tiene el propósito de explicar en qué consiste la buena calidad educativa. Estudiando diversos sistemas escolares, tanto con buenos como con malos resultados, se muestran las razones por las que el modelo educativo prevaleciente en muchos países occidentales no funciona. Y, propone un cambio de mentalidad y política educativa en la que el esfuerzo del alumno, el apoyo de la familia, y el aprendizaje de los contenidos y, muy especialmente, de la lengua, tengan un papel central.

One of the greatest American achievements in the 20th century was the creation of public schools and universal education, an ideal now deeply at risk. Cornell University professor Noliwe Rooks provides a critical account of the making and unmaking of public education in Cutting School, the first book to foreground how vast racial and economic divides are part and parcel of the push to privatize our education system.

" J'ai décidé de publier le cours de mon frère pour lui rendre sa dignité d'homme et de professeur. Parce que ce cours est la raison pour laquelle mon frère est mort, et que vous ignorez tout de son contenu. Vous ne savez pas que c'est dans le cadre de cet enseignement, inscrit au programme de quatrième, que Samuel a montré des caricatures. Je le publie aussi parce que j'ai entendu trop de " Oui, mais. " Or en France, on ne met pas de " Oui, mais " après qu'un professeur se soit fait décapiter. On met un point. ".

On rare occasions in American history, Congress enacts a measure so astute, so far-reaching, so revolutionary, it enters the language as a metaphor. The Marshall Plan comes to mind, as does the Civil Rights Act. But perhaps none resonates in the American imagination like the G.I. Bill.

Can money buy high-quality education? Studies find only a weak relationship between public school funding and educational outcomes. In The Money Myth, W. Norton Grubb proposes a powerful paradigm shift in the way we think about why some schools thrive and others fail. The greatest inequalities in America's schools lie in factors other than fiscal support. Fundamental differences in resources other than money explain the deepening divide in the success of our nation's schoolchildren.

In What's the Point of College?, historian Johann N. Neem offers a new way to think about the major questions facing higher education today, from online education to disruptive innovation to how students really learn. As commentators, reformers, and policymakers call for dramatic change and new educational models, this collection of lucid essays asks us to pause and take stock. What is a college education supposed to be? What kinds of institutions and practices will best help us get there? And which virtues must colleges and universities cultivate to sustain their desired ends?

Not so long ago, conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. believed universities were worth fighting for. Today, conservatives seem more inclined to burn them down. In Let's Be Reasonable, conservative political theorist and professor Jonathan Marks finds in liberal education an antidote to this despair, arguing that the true purpose of college is to encourage people to be reasonable. Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and other thinkers, Marks presents the case for why, now more than ever, conservatives must not give up on higher education.