Paradoxes Of The Public School

Is the American public school doing what we want it to do? Or, is what we want it to do in conflict with what society allows it to do? This book takes on issues central to understanding the complexities of the American public school experience. Readers are simultaneously taken into the historical and contemporary context of these issues through an honest and provocative approach that engages them into the real world of school. Chapters revolve around key issues such as religion, democracy, teachers, race, reform, pedagogy, efficiency, freedom, segregation, social class, exceptionality, gender, technology, and accountability. Paradoxes of the Public School promises to foster a thoughtful dialogue on the complexity of school and how best to improve it for the future. Teacher educators may find it useful to help develop teacher candidates’ understanding of the nature of school. However, anyone interested in the nature of school will find this book insightful, clear, and easy to follow. All readers will find this book to be cutting edge as it creatively fills a dire need for a compelling tale of school that is both informative and thought provoking.

As a nation, we spend more than $1 billion a year on federally mandated educational tests that 30 million students must take each year. The country spends an additional $1.2 billion on test preparation materials designed to help students pass these tests. While test mandates were put in place with good intentions, increasingly educational leaders and policy makers are questioning these test based reform efforts. Some question whether these programs are doing more harm than good. Others call for the development of more and better tests. Given the vast amount of resources our nation pours into testing, is it time we pay closer attention to these testing programs? Is it time we hold the testing industry and policy makers accountable for the tests they make and use? Is it time we invest resources to develop new ways of testing our students? The Paradoxes of High-Stakes Testing explores these and other questions, as it helps parents, teachers, educational leaders, and policy makers better understand the complexities of educational policies that use tests as a lever for improving the quality of education. The book explores: >> how testing is used to enable teachers and schools to be more effective and improve student learning, >> why testing is so ingrained in the American psyche and why policy makers rely on testing policies to reform our educational system, >> what we can learn from a long history of test-based reform efforts that have occurred over centuries and across continents, >> what effects testing has on teaching and learning in our schools when it is used to solve political, social, or economic problems. Most importantly, the book describes several ways in which testing can be improved to provide more accurate and more useful measures of student learning. Many of these improvements capitalize on technology to provide teachers with more detailed, diagnostic information about student learning and measure skills that some leaders argue are essential for the 21st century work force. Exploring what is within reach is critical because current testing policies are hindering these improvements. Finally, given that testing is and will continue to be an integral part of our educational system, the book concludes that, like other sectors of our society, educational testing must be more closely monitored to ensure that high quality tests are used to measure student achievement and to minimize the negative effects that testing has on students, schools, and our society. Given the opportunity our nation has to rethink and redesign its testing policies, The Paradoxes of High-Stakes Testing presents a clear strategy to maximize the positive effects of educational testing.

In 2005 the World Bank released a gender assessment of the nation of Jordan, a country that, like many in the Middle East, has undergone dramatic social and gender transformations, in part by encouraging equal access to education for men and women. The resulting demographic picture there—highly educated women who still largely stay at home as mothers and caregivers— prompted the World Bank to label Jordan a “gender paradox.” In Gendered Paradoxes, Fida J. Adely shows that assessment to be a fallacy, taking readers into the rarely seen halls of a Jordanian public school—the al-Khatwa High School for Girls—and revealing the dynamic lives of its students, for whom such trends are far from paradoxical. Through the lives of these students, Adely explores the critical issues young people in Jordan grapple with today: nationalism and national identity, faith and the requisites of pious living, appropriate and respectable gender roles, and progress. In the process she shows the important place of education in Jordan, one less tied to the economic ends of labor and employment that are so emphasized by the rest of the developed world. In showcasing alternative values and the highly capable young women who hold them, Adely raises fundamental questions about what constitutes development, progress, and empowerment—not just for Jordanians, but for the whole world.

In today's schools the number of students who receive additional resources to access the curriculum is growing rapidly, and the ongoing expansion of special education is among the most significant worldwide educational developments of the past century. Yet even among developed democracies the range of access varies hugely, from one student in twenty to one student in three. In contemporary conflicts about educational standards and accountability, special education plays a key role as it draws the boundaries between exclusion and inclusion. Comparing Special Education unites in-depth comparative and historical studies with analyses of global trends, with a particular focus on special and inclusive education in the United States, England, France, and Germany. The authors examine the causes and consequences of various institutional and organizational developments, illustrate differences in forms of educational governance and social policy priorities, and highlight the evolution of social logics from segregation of students with special educational needs to their inclusion in local schools.

The present context of testing and the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind make the proposed book timely and important. Current testing programs provide valuable information to teachers, parents, and policy-makers about students, schools, and school systems. But paradoxically, these programs have unintended yet predictable negative consequences for many students, teachers, and schools. It is essential that the public and policy-makers understand the scope and impacts that result from the inherent paradoxical nature of high-stakes testing.

The relationship between aid and state building is highly complex and the effects of aid on weak states depend on donors’ interests, aid modalities and the recipient’s pre-existing institutional and socio-political conditions. This book argues that, in the case of Afghanistan, the country inherited conditions that were not favourable for effective state building. Although some of the problems that emerged in the post-2001 state building process were predictable, the types of interventions that occurred—including an aid architecture which largely bypassed the state, the subordination of state building to the war on terror, and the short horizon policy choices of donors and the Afghan government—reduced the effectiveness of the aid and undermined effective state building. By examining how foreign aid affected state building in Afghanistan since the US militarily intervened in Afghanistan in late 2001 until the end of President Hamid Karzai’s first term in 2009, this book reveals the dynamic and complex relations between the Afghan government and foreign donors in their efforts to rebuild state institutions. The work explores three key areas: how donors supported government reforms to improve the taxation system, how government reorganized the state’s fiscal management system, and how aid dependency and aid distribution outside the government budget affected interactions between state and society. Given that external revenue in the form of tribute, subsidies and aid has shaped the characteristics of the state in Afghanistan since the mid-eighteenth century, this book situates state building in a historical context. This book will be invaluable for practitioners and anyone studying political economy, state building, international development and the politics of foreign aid.

An eye-opening investigation into local evasions of school integration In this provocative appraisal of desegregation in South Carolina, R. Scott Baker contends that half a century after the Brown decision we still know surprisingly little about the new system of public education that replaced segregated caste arrangements in the South. Much has been written about the most dramatic battles for black access to southern schools, but Baker examines the rational and durable evasions that authorities institutionalized in response to African American demands for educational opportunity. A case study of southern evasions, Paradoxes of Desegregation documents the new educational order that grew out of decades of conflict between African American civil rights activists and South Carolina's political leadership. During the 1940s, Baker shows, a combination of black activism on a local level and NAACP litigation forced state officials to increase funding for black education. This early phase of the struggle in turn accelerated the development of institutions that cultivated a new generation of grass roots leaders. Baker demonstrates that white resistance to integration did not commence or crystallize after Brown. Instead, beginning in the 1940s, authorities in South Carolina institutionalized an exclusionary system of standardized testing that, according to Baker, exploited African Americans' educational disadvantages, limited access to white schools, and confined black South Carolinians to separate institutions. As massive resistance to desegregation collapsed in the late 1950s, officials in other southern states followed South Carolina's lead, adopting testing policies that continue to govern the region's educational system. Paradoxes of Desegregation brings much needed historical perspective to contemporary debates about the landmark federal education law, No Child Left Behind. Baker analyzes decades of historical evidence related to high-stakes testing and concludes that desegregation, while a triumph for advantaged blacks, has paradoxically been a tragedy for most African Americans.