Curmudgucation

Peter Greene blogs about the current state of public education with plenty of sass and not much rigor. This book includes almost 100 favorites from his popular blogs Curmudgucation and View from the Cheap Seats, and makes the case that there is much to love at US public education and much not to take serious about many of the folks who want to tear down one of our most fundamental democratic institutions.

“The education wars have been demoralizing for teachers. . . . After the Education Wars helps us to see a better way forward.” —Cathy N. Davidson, The New York Times Book Review “After the Education Wars is an important book that points the way to genuine reform.” —Diane Ravitch, author of Reign of Error and The Death and Life of the Great American School System A bestselling business journalist critiques the top-down approach of popular education reforms and profiles the unexpected success of schools embracing a nimbler, more democratic entrepreneurialism In an entirely fresh take on school reform, business journalist and bestselling author Andrea Gabor argues that Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other leaders of the prevailing education-reform movement have borrowed all the wrong lessons from the business world. After the Education Wars explains how the market-based measures and carrot-and-stick incentives informing today’s reforms are out of sync with the nurturing culture that good schools foster and—contrary to popular belief—at odds with the best practices of thriving twenty-first-century companies as well. These rich, detailed stories of real reform in action illustrate how enduring change must be deeply collaborative and relentlessly focused on improvement from the grass roots up—lessons also learned from both the open-source software and quality movements. The good news is that solutions born of this philosophy are all around us: from Brockton, Massachusetts, where the state’s once-failing largest high school now sends most graduates to college, to Leander, Texas, a large district where school improvement, spurred by the ideas of quality guru W. Edwards Deming, has become a way of life. A welcome exception to the doom-and-gloom canon of education reform, After the Education Wars makes clear that what’s needed is not more grand ideas, but practical and informed ways to grow the best ones that are already transforming schools.

When did the Common Core evolve from pet project to pariah among educators and parents? This book examines the rise and fall of our national education standards from their inception to the present day. Parents, teachers, and political groups have waged debates over the Common Core since the standards' adoption in 2010. This timely examination explores the shifting political alliances related to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, explains why initial national support has faded, and considers the major debates running through the Common Core controversy. The book is organized around four themes of political conflict: federal versus state control, minorities versus majorities, experts versus professionals, and elites versus local preferences. The work reviews the politics of state and national standards, evaluating the political arguments for and against the Common Core: federal overreach, lack of evidence for effectiveness, lack of parental control, lack of teacher input, improper adaptive testing, overtesting, and connections to private education-reform funders and foundations. The work includes a short primer on the Common Core State Standards Initiative as well as on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balance, two state-level organizations that have worked on the standards. An informative appendix presents brief descriptions of major interest groups and think tanks involved with the standards initiative along with a timeline of American educational standards reforms and the Common Core.

In What Else Can a Teacher Do? Review Your Career, Reduce Stress and Gain Control of Your Life, David Hodgson surveys and suggests a diverse range of alternative career options suited to teachers' transferable skill sets. Some teachers reach a point where they question their role in the classroom; they want to consider something different, but don't know where to start. In this practical handbook, David combines expert careers guidance with a carefully compiled list of over one hundred job profiles in order to help teachers find clarity on their career path, and presents numerous case studies of teachers and education professionals who have already successfully done so. So whether you're tentatively weighing up career alternatives, actively planning your route out of the school environment, or simply assessing where you are in teaching possibly eyeing a change of class, key stage, sector, working hours, or even country What Else Can a Teacher Do? helps guide you through your options. David feels passionately that everyone should be supported to find a rewarding career that suits their unique mix of skills, qualities and experience, and in this book he has distilled his specialist careers advice and extensive research in order to address the most frequently asked questions that weigh upon teachers' minds. What Else Can a Teacher Do? presents a measured approach to career evaluation to help you gain a better perspective on your work satisfaction at present before moving on to explore how your contextual experience and in-demand skill set can be transferred to a multitude of other professional roles and environments. Split into three interactive and user-friendly parts, What Else Can a Teacher Do? features a variety of self-reflective checklists, charts and activities to engage with; an exploratory range of at least thirty education-based career moves to consider; and a comprehensive list of around 120 job profiles providing details on the key roles, entry routes, salaries and tasks involved in each profession to both inform and inspire. Plus, in order to help you accurately compare your current position with these realistic career alternatives, all of the jobs listed have some overlap with the skills and interests teachers develop in the classroom and each job profile is complemented with a select listing of reliable websites for more detailed information and sources of vacancies. This book is not intended to serve as a survival guide or as an escape manual. A survival guide implies you'll do just enough frenetic gasping and paddling to keep your head above the turbulent water, while an escape manual is an equally dangerous proposition as it implies that change is easy. It is not. Rather, What Else Can a Teacher Do? provides a wealth of suggestions in order to help you move on in your teaching journey, and lays out some alternatives to teaching so that you can take a peek with a dispassionate and critical eye if you are contemplating making a bigger change in your working life. What else can a teacher do? David Hodgson has the answers. Essential reading for teachers who are 'stuck in a rut' and want to explore other options. Contents include: Part 1 Where are you now?; Part 2 What are your job options? Section 1 Job options based around teaching skills, Section 2 Job options for recent graduates, Section 3 Job options for school leaders; Part 3 Job profiles.

A real-world action plan for educators to create personalized learning experiences Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom provides teachers, administrators, and educational leaders with a clear and practical guide to personalized learning. Written by respected teachers and leading educational consultants Allison Zmuda, Greg Curtis, and Diane Ullman, this comprehensive resource explores what personalized learning looks like, how it changes the roles and responsibilities of every stakeholder, and why it inspires innovation. The authors explain that, in order to create highly effective personalized learning experiences, a new instructional design is required that is based loosely on the traditional model of apprenticeship: learning by doing. Learning Personalized challenges educators to rethink the fundamental principles of schooling that honors students' natural willingness to play, problem solve, fail, re-imagine, and share. This groundbreaking resource: Explores the elements of personalized learning and offers a framework to achieve it Provides a roadmap for enrolling relevant stakeholders to create a personalized learning vision and reimagine new roles and responsibilities Addresses needs and provides guidance specific to the job descriptions of various types of educators, administrators, and other staff This invaluable educational resource explores a simple framework for personalized learning: co-creation, feedback, sharing, and learning that is as powerful for a teacher to re-examine classroom practice as it is for a curriculum director to reexamine the structure of courses.

"This book explores the ways student affairs professionals in higher education use social media as a new tool to help them accomplish their goals on campus"--

This book provides a critical analysis of the neoliberal reform agenda of the economic governance of schools. Focusing on the role of the United States in this process, it explores the transformation of schools in this agenda from educational establishments to enterprises in a competitive education market. The study uses Bourdieu to apply a field-theoretical framework to a detailed empirical analysis of the current changes of school government. Chapters explore education bureaucracy, reform and the effect of outside organizations on pedagogy and testing. The book reveals how far the promises of corporate education reform are from reality and concludes with a plea for a realistic view of school’s capabilities. It goes beyond the state of the art with its focus on how the governance of education, school and instruction is changing with the replacement of educracy by an education-industrial complex. The book will be of great interest for academics, postgraduate students, administrators and politicians in the field of education policy, the governance of school systems and schools. The book also has an international appeal as it studies a global transformation of the field of education.

Reclaiming the Teaching Profession gives educators (especially teachers and future teachers) and their allies a clear overview of the massive effort to dismantle public education in the United States, which includes a direct attack on teachers. The book details, and provides a systematic critique of, the shaky assumptions at the foundation of the market-based reform initiatives that dominate the contemporary education scene. It names and exposes the motives and methods of the powerful philanthropists, politicians, business moguls, and education entrepreneurs who are behind the reform movement. It provides counter narratives that public school advocates can use to talk back to those who would destroy the teaching profession and public education. It includes examples of successful acts of resistance and identifies resources for challenging reformers’ taken for granted primacy in the education debate. It concludes with strategies educators can use to “speak truth to power,” reclaim their professional status, and reshape the education landscape in ways that serve all of America’s children and preserve our democracy.