School Work

“This book merits every American’s serious consideration” (Vice President Joe Biden): from the Secretary of Education under President Obama, an exposé of the status quo that helps maintain a broken system at the expense of our kids’ education, and threatens our nation’s future. “Education runs on lies. That’s probably not what you’d expect from a former Secretary of Education, but it’s the truth.” So opens Arne Duncan’s How Schools Work, although the title could just as easily be How American Schools Work for Some, Not for Others, and Only Now and Then for Kids. Drawing on nearly three decades in education—from his mother’s after-school program on Chicago’s South Side to his tenure as Secretary of Education in Washington, DC—How Schools Work follows Arne (as he insists you call him) as he takes on challenges at every turn: gangbangers in Chicago housing projects, parents who call him racist, teachers who insist they can’t help poor kids, unions that refuse to modernize, Tea Partiers who call him an autocrat, affluent white progressive moms who hate yearly tests, and even the NRA, which once labeled Arne the “most extreme anti-gun member of President Obama’s Cabinet.” Going to a child’s funeral every couple of weeks, as he did when he worked in Chicago, will do that to a person. How Schools Work exposes the lies that have caused American kids to fall behind their international peers, from early childhood all the way to college graduation rates. But it also identifies what really does make a school work. “As insightful as it is inspiring” (Washington Book Review), How Schools Work will embolden parents, teachers, voters, and even students to demand more of our public schools. If America is going to be great, then we can accept nothing less.

"This book is about the threats to education quality in the developing world that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews the observed phenomenon of service delivery failures in public education: cases where programs and policies increase the inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts - in schools and classrooms. It documents what we know about the extent and costs of such failures across low and middle-income countries. And it further develops the conceptual model posited in the World Development Report 2004: that a root cause of low-quality and inequitable public services - not only in education - is the weak accountability of providers to both their supervisors and clients.The central focus of the book, however, is a new story. It is that developing countries are increasingly adopting innovative strategies to attack these problems. Drawing on new evidence from 22 rigorous impact evaluations across 11 developing countries, this book examines how three key strategies to strengthen accountability relationships in developing country school systems have affected school enrollment, completion and student learning. The book reviews the motivation and global context for education reforms aimed at strengthening provider accountability. It provides the rationally and synthesizes the evidence on the impacts of three key lines of reform: (1) policies that use the power of information to strengthen the ability of clients of education services (students and their parents) to hold providers accountable for results; (2) policies that promote school-based management?that is increase schools? autonomy to make key decisions and control resources, often empowering parents to play a larger role; (3) teacher incentives reforms that specifically aim at making teachers more accountable for results, either by making contract tenure dependent on performance, or offering performance-linked pay. The book summarizes the lessons learned, draws cautious conclusions about possible complementarities across different types of accountability-focused reforms if they are implemented in tandem, considers issues related to scaling up reform efforts and the political economy of reform, and suggests directions for future work."

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How did a young generation of activists come together in 1990s Los Angeles to shake up the education system, creating lasting institutional change and lifting children and families across southern California? Critics claim that America's public schools remain feckless and hamstrung institutions, unable to improve even when nudged by accountability-minded politicians, market competition, or global pandemic. But if schools are so hopeless, then why did student learning climb in Los Angeles across the initial decades of the twenty-first century? In When Schools Work, Bruce Fuller details the rise of civic activists in L.A. as they emerged from the ashes of urban riots and failed efforts to desegregate schools. Based on the author's fifteen years of field work in L.A., the book reveals how this network of Latino and Black leaders, civil rights lawyers, ethnic nonprofits, and pedagogical progressives coalesced in the 1990s, staking out a third political ground and gaining distance from corporate neoliberals and staid labor chiefs. Fuller shows how these young activists—whom he terms "new pluralists"—proceeded to better fund central-city schools, win quality teachers, widen access to college prep courses, decriminalize student discipline, and even create a panoply of new school forms, from magnet schools to dual-language campuses, site-run small high schools, and social-justice focused classrooms. Moving beyond perennial hand-wringing over urban schools, this book offers empirical lessons on what reforms worked to lift achievement—and kids—across this vast and racially divided metropolis. More broadly, this study examines why these new pluralists emerged in this kaleidoscopic city and how they went about jolting an institution once given up for dead. Spotlighting the force of ethnic communities and humanist notions of children's growth, Fuller argues that diversifying forms of schooling also created unforeseen ways of stratifying both children and families. When Schools Work will inform the efforts of educators, activists, policy makers, and anyone else working to reshape public schools and achieve equitable results for all children.

In the past decade or so, scholars in the United States have identified the emergence of a new, distinct stage of life, as adolescence has become protracted, and most young people of recent generations take longer to achieve economic and psychological autonomy than they did a half century ago. This new life stage, in between adolescence and adulthood when young people are in a semiautonomous state, has come to be known as "early adulthood." Main characteristics of this new life stage include a later entry into the work force, a longer period of time living in the natal home, and a delayed age at marriage and childbearing. These trends not only have profound implications for young adults' well-being and intergenerational relationships but also challenge social institutions, such as family, schools, labor markets, and many youth-serving institutions.

From School to Work helps students make smooth transitions from their classrooms to meaningful jobs. The text emphasizes the skills students need to succeed in school, at work, and on their own.

School Credit for Home Work is a book by L.R. Alderman. It proposes a clever educational system where pupils can gain school credit for doing tasks at home, whether they be house work, or farm and garden work.

The author wxplores issues of race, class, and gender among white working class youths, and she considers the roles of school and family in the production of the self. The book also examines the working class teens' attitudes toward and readiness for postfeminist thinking and the emerging American New Right. Presenting the first sustained ethnographic investigation of white working class youth in the context of deindustrializatin, Weis offers a complex portrait of how these young people produce themselves in a society vastly different from that of their parents and grandparents.