High Stakes High Hopes

High Stakes, High Hopes tracks the building of urban theorizing in a decade-long urban research and teaching partnership in Cape Town, South Africa.An argument for collaborative urbanism, this book reflects on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution. High Stakes, High Hopes explores what changed in learning when teaching and assessment occurred inuniversity classrooms, township streets, and ordinary people’s households.Oldfield explores how research and assessment were reshaped when framed in neighbourhood questions and commitments, and what was reoriented in urban theorizing when community activism and township struggles were recognized as sites of valid knowledge-making. Oldfield traces the multiple personal and political relationships at play, exploring the shifting patterns of power in this productive, yet always negotiated, collaboration. This innovative methodologyreveals the ways in which activists, residents, students, and the author experienced and reworked the differences between them. High Stakes, High Hopesshares forms of practice, grounded in teaching, to train a next generation of urbanists to engage the city embedded in multiple publics and politics across the city. The book builds upon an archive of alternative kinds of urban knowledges, experiments which work to inspire more varied forms of urban theorizing.

To understand how high-stakes accountability has influenced teaching and learning, this book looks at the consequences that high-stakes tests hold for students, teachers, administrators, and the public, and demonstrates the negative effects of such testing on nontested subjects, minority students, and students with special needs.

The federal government's No Child Left Behind Act has thrust high-stakes testing - its goals, methods, and consequences - into the educational limelight. The four-fold purpose of this book is to: describe the nature of high-stakes testing; identify types of collateral damage that have attended the testing programs; analyze methods different groups of people have chosen for coping with the damage and suggest lessons to be learned from the high-stakes-testing experience. The six groups of people whose coping strategies are inspected include: politicians and their staffs; educational administrators and their staffs; parents and the public; test makers and test administrators; teachers and students. Importantly, the author avoids aligning himself with the test-bashing rhetoric of those who oppose high-stakes testing, especially the No Child Left Behind Act. Key features of this outstanding new book include: illustrative cases. The book offers more than 350 cases of collateral damage from high-stakes testing--and people's coping strategies--as reported in newspapers over the 2002-2004 period. background perspectives. Part I examines the influence of high-stakes testing on: 1) what schools teach; 2) how student progress is evaluated; 3) how achievement standards are set; and 4) how test results are used. participant responses. Part II, which is the heart of the book, devotes a separate chapter to the coping strategies of each of the major participants in the high-stakes testing movement: politicians and their staffs, educational administrators and their staffs, parents and the public, test-makers and test-givers, teachers, and students. summary chapter. The last chapter (Lessons to Learn) offers suggestions for minimizing collateral damage by adopting alternative approaches not used in the creation of our current high-stakes testing programs, particularly the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act. This book is appropriate for any of the following audiences: students taking evaluation or administration courses in schools of education, inservice administrators and teachers, policy makers, and those members of the general public who are concerned about the fate of schooling in America.

A guide to parents of high school students presents advice on communicating with the principal and other administrators about standardized testing, past score results, school policies, and important academic issues; understanding your teen's learning style and playing a more meaningful role in his or her high school experience; and becoming involved at the local high school in ways that will benefit your teen.

In his latest book, bestselling author Gregory Michie critiques high-stakes schooling and provides a powerful alternative vision of teaching as a humanistic enterprise, students as multidimensional beings, and schools as spaces where young people can imagine and become, not just achieve. Drawing on his experiences over the past two decades as a classroom teacher, community volunteer, researcher, and teacher educator in Chicago's public schools, Michie offers compelling accounts of teaching and learning in urban America. Mindful of the complex realities educators face, he portrays urban schools as they really are: sites of struggle, hope, and possibility. At a time when others relentlessly trumpet a competitive, data-driven, corporatized notion of education, the essays in We Don't Need Another Hero challenge the dominant images of failing urban schools and bad teachers. Like Michie's now classic Holler If You Hear Me, this book gives much-needed hope to new and seasoned teachers alike. It is also an important resource for school administrators, policymakers, parents, and anyone who wants to better understand what is really happening in American schools. Gregory Michie teaches in the Department of Foundations and Social Policy at Concordia University Chicago. He is the bestselling author of Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students, Second Edition, and See You When We Get There: Teaching for Change in Urban Schools. “Greg Michie is right: we don't need another hero. The heroes are already there: they are our students, as well as the teachers and administrators who have a passion for justice.Those are the voices we must heed.” —From the Foreword by Sonia Nieto, professor emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst “There is no writer working today who captures the excruciating complexity of a life in teaching with as much grace and clarity as Gregory Michie. These everyday heroes are the heart of teaching and the soul of democracy.” —William Ayers, educator and bestselling author of To Teach, Third Edition and Teaching the Taboo “Gregory Michie's experiences in the classroom and his purview post-teaching make this a good peek into the thoughts of a man willing to challenge the current notions of education reform. Rather than sit in frustration over the current tenor surrounding these so-called reforms, Michie seeks meaningful progress and solutions.” —Jose Luis Vilson, NYC Public School lead teacher and writer at TheJoseVilson.com

“If they are going to kill us anyway, we might as well die in our lands.” With these words and a shrug of shoulders, a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) explains their decision to occupy more than 20,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Bajo Aguán region in Northern Honduras after the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. The Coup under the Palm Trees interrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country’s spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of “empty” lands to the centerpiece of the country’s agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while a militarized process of state formation took place between the coups of 1963 and 2009. Rather than a case of failed democratic transition, the book shows how the current Honduran crisis—exemplified by massive outmigration towards the United States, blatant narco-state links, and the 2009 coup—is better understood within longer historical processes in which violence, exclusion, and dispossession became the central organizational principles of the state.

What makes some leaders so effective when the stakes are high, while others fall short? Why are some able to not only survive but to lead their organizations to new heights even in risky, fast-changing times? The answer is succinct but multi-layered: such leaders display courage, judgment, and fortitude. High-stakes leadership does not require unnatural powers, nor is it predicated on a dangerous situation. The three signature character traits can be cultivated by anyone at any level in any organization, big or small. Organizational and leadership consultant Constance Dierickx describes high-stakes leadership in a simple, three-part model that illuminates the mindsets, strategies, and tactics leaders must draw upon to make tough decisions, take an unpopular stand, or ignore convention, providing real-world examples across a range of sectors and industries. Dierickx developed her model of high-stakes leadership to help her clients—executives at organizations ranging from start-ups to nonprofits to large, global companies—better define what they need to bring strategy to life. This, she found, is the great gulf in business, the vast space between idea and results. High-Stakes Leadership helps leaders sharpen their ability to: act decisively, with clarity and focus test ideas using reason, and course correct as needed be resolute and inspire others to continue, even in the face of challenges Leading requires the courage to make conscious decisions about what to do, the judgment to separate information from short-term trends, and the fortitude to remain true to oneself and one’s mission. When leaders do these things, they also become teachers, leading their teams by example, often without realizing it. The essential aspects of good leadership endure even as the environment and tactics change. Indeed, courage, judgment, and fortitude are not merely tools for survival, they are the means by which we sculpt the future.