The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a continuing and nationally representative assessment of what this nation's students know and can do. NAEP has often been called the "gold standard" of assessments because it is developed using the best thinking of assessment and content specialists, education experts, and…

Background/Context: In the past 35 years, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program has spread to 483 schools across the United States, with an ever-growing share of these schools located in the inner city. These American school sites comprise vastly different contexts than those in which the IB program began-the international schools of…

This article considers how the private finance initiative, a contract for infrastructure, affected teachers' perceptions of efficacy, job satisfaction, and morale at an urban secondary school in the United Kingdom. Qualitative data collection techniques, including unstructured observation and semistructured personal interviews, were utilized to…

The change needed in urban music education not only relates to the idea that music should be at the center of the curriculum; rather, it is that culturally relevant music should be a creative force at the center of reform in urban education. This set is the start of a national-level conversation aimed at making that goal a reality. In both…

This highly acclaimed volume in the "Defending Public Schools" series is now available in paperback from Teachers College Press. It is a practical, necessary addition to the work of administrators, teachers, policymakers, and parents as they negotiate the difficult path of how to best teach and educate today's children and youth. This…

The concept of critical media literacy expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication and popular culture, as well as deepens the potential of literacy education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. The authors argue that critical media literacy is crucial for…

Written by an interdisciplinary group of experts in education, psychology, sociology, and other fields, this landmark handbook provides a thorough examination of U.S. secondary education from the private academies of Colonial America to the comprehensive high schools and alternative schools of today. This accessible compendium is a treasure trove…