America is being held back by the quality and quantity of learning in college. This is a true educational emergency! Many college graduates cannot think critically, write effectively, solve problems, understand complex issues, or meet employers' expectations. We are losing our minds--and endangering our social, economic, and scientific leadership.…

What constitutes a high quality teacher education program and what standards teacher candidates should meet before receiving their teaching credential? This volume advances deep understanding of the nature and sources of policy affecting the preparation of teachers in the U.S. and the conflicts or interconnections of these policies with the…

This important and much-needed book is based on a longitudinal study of fifty new teachers during their first years in the classroom. It highlights the cases of ten, whose stories vividly illustrate the joys and disappointments of new teachers in today's schools. The book documents why they entered teaching, what they encountered in their schools,…

In this volume in the "Between Teacher and Text Series", the author provides a contemporary interpretation of the 1967 text "Letter to a Teacher by the Schoolboys of Barbiana". The original text, a searing indictment of class bias in Italian schools, was released in English in 1970, and its ideas about education and…

Leila Christenbury is well known as a writer and researcher in English Education: her classic book "Making the Journey," [ED437654] now in its third edition, has been a guide to countless middle and high school language arts teachers. In her new book, this veteran teacher and teacher educator reveals what did and---more surprisingly---did not…

In this book, the author uses his experiences as a parent, teacher, and school board member to explore what has gone wrong with education and how to make it right. He takes the reader inside classrooms, locker rooms, school board meetings, and parent-teacher conferences to discover how children are being educated--or, more often than not,…

The current reform movement in education is investigated in this book through analysis of the many reports on the state of the nation's schools collectively called the excellence reports. Five areas of investigation are focused upon in this volume: (1) an overview of what the excellence reports say; (2) a consideration of the social, political,…

This publication explores the variety of notions that exist regarding the diversity of higher education. It favors efforts to keep differences of quality and function within higher education in check, thus ensuring chances for socially and economically disadvantaged students to share common experiences with others and facilitating a…

Nationally set indicators of performance have increasingly become a medium for exercising choice and decision making in the new education market place. Contributors to this book suggest that such a framework is not unproblematic. This book offers some insights into the general debate about performance indicators in education. It explores the…

This book presents two dominant and rival conceptions of quality in higher education. One is based on the expression of the tacit conceptions of value and propriety in the academic community. It is the character and quality of the continuing interactions of higher education's members that are at issue rather than any endpoint or definitive…

This book offers 24 perspectives from educators, students, advocates, journalists, policymakers, and citizens on education reform and the importance of improving America's schools and school systems. Articles include the following: (1) "What Only a Governor Can Do" (Lamar Alexander); (2) "Governors and the National Education Goals" (Carroll A.…

In this monograph, 13 authors offer their perspectives on the essential components of good schools. One interesting commonality is the tension expressed between institutional structure and personal values. Another issue that surfaces centers on the rising expectations of society for school achievement and the need for making learning more student…

This book is about managing schools for quality, with a focus on how teachers can manage students more effectively and how administrators can use the same methods to manage teachers. It explains how Deming's ideas can replace the present elitist system in the schools, in which only a few students are involved in high-quality work. Control theory…

This book recounts how American schools undertook reform after reform, based on unproven and unworkable theories, resulting in attention being diverted from the schools' essential purpose: the intellectual development of every child. American educators have committed three historical errors. First, they tried to turn the school into a vehicle for…

The 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" exposed an alleged crisis in the United States educational system. This book argues that the American school system is not really in as bad a shape as reported by the media and other government and industry sources. The book admits the existence of problems in the educational system, but insists that many of the…