Smart Good High Schools

Throughout history, and in cultures all over the world, education rightly conceived has had two great goals: to help students become smart and to help them become good. They need character for both. Smart & Good High Schools, a 227-page "report to the nation" by Thomas Lickona and Matthew Davidson based on two years of research on American high schools, describes nearly 100 promising practices for developing adolescent character. These practices are organized around a vision aimed at encouraging a paradigm shift in character education: from focusing only on moral character to focusing on both performance character (needed for best work) and moral character (needed for ethical behavior). The report's research included visits to 24 diverse high schools, a comprehensive research review, and the input of a National Experts Panel and a National Student Leaders Panel. --Publisher description.

Perkins reveals the common misguided strategies students use and offers teachers and parents advice on how they can help their children. Although there has been a great deal of impassioned debate over the sad state of American education today, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. But, as David Perkins demonstrates, we cannot solve our problems in this area simply by redistributing power or by asking children to regurgitate facts on a multiple choice exam. Rather we must ask what kinds of knowledge students typically acquire in school. In Smart Schools, Perkins draws on over twenty years of research to reveal the common misguided strategies students use in trying to understand a topic, and then shows teachers and parents what strategies they can use with children to increase real understanding.

What makes a good school? A prominent Harvard educator looks for the answers in six schools that have earned reputations for excellence: George Washington Carver High School in Atlanta; John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx, New York; Highland Park High School near Chicago; Bookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts; St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire; and the Milton Academy, near Boston.

This is the remarkable story of the creation of a new kind of high school that truly aspires to educate all students to high standards. Believing that a deeply personalized culture can prevent the senseless violence that has invaded many public schools, educators at Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire set out to create a safe, caring, and academically rigorous school. In this volume, Silva (a teacher) and Mackin (a principal) chronicle their experiences as they worked through the many challenges that ultimately resulted in this extraordinarily successful school. Featuring their honest reflections and the voices of other participants, this book: -- Portrays a real public high school (not a small alternative school) that is successfully implementing most of the reform practices recommended by national reform models. -- Demonstrates how schools can strike a balance between the need for stricter safety measures and the social and emotional needs of each student, thus avoiding violent outbursts in schools. -- Details the school's structure, curriculum, professional culture, and systems of accountability for all students in a heterogeneous, inclusionary setting. -- Describes the use of teaming, advisory groups, exhibitions, and senior projects. -- Provides a working model of the "Breaking Ranks" recommendations, including the importance of "personalization" and democracy in education.

This collection applies the principles underlying values education to addressing the many social and learning challenges that impinge on education today . Insights in the fields of social and emotional learning, student wellbeing, and, increasingly, educational neuroscience have demonstrated that values education represents an efficacious pedagogy with holistic effects on students across a range of measures, including social, emotional, and intellectual outcomes. With schools in the 21st century confronting issues such as gender identity, stemming radicalism, mental health, equity for disadvantaged groups, bullying, respect, and the meaning of consent, values education offers a way of teaching and learning that integrates and enhances student’s affective and cognitive functioning. The earlier edition of this book has become a standard reference for scholars and practitioners in the fields of values education, moral education, and character education. Its citation rates, reads and downloads have been consistently and enduringly high, as have those of its companion text, Values Pedagogy and Student Achievement. A decade on, the main purpose of the revised edition is to update and incorporate new research and practice relevant to values education. Recent insights in the fields of neuroscience and social and emotional learning and their implications for education and student wellbeing are more overt than they were when the first edition was being compiled. Additionally, advanced thinking in the field of epistemology, how humans come to know and therefore learn, has also sharpened, especially through the later writings of prominent scholars like Jurgen Habermas. The revised edition has preserved the essential spirit and thrust of the original edition while making space for some of these new insights about the potential of values education to establish optimal and harmonious learning and social environments for both students and teachers.

Informed by the most up-to-date research from around the world, as well as examples of good practice, this handbook analyzes values education in the context of a range of school-based measures associated with student wellbeing. These include social, emotional, moral and spiritual growth – elements that seem to be present where intellectual advancement and academic achievement are being maximized. This text comes as ‘values education’ widens in scope from being concerned with morality, ethics, civics and citizenship to a broader definition synonymous with a holistic approach to education in general. This expanded purview is frequently described as pedagogy relating to ‘values’ and ‘wellbeing’. This contemporary understanding of values education, or values and wellbeing pedagogy, fits well with recent neuroscience research. This has shown that notions of cognition, or intellect, are far more intertwined with social and emotional growth than earlier educational paradigms have allowed for. In other words, the best laid plans about the technical aspects of pedagogy are bound to fail unless the growth of the whole person – social, emotional, moral, spiritual and intellectual, is the pedagogical target. Teachers and educationalists will find that this handbook provides evidence, culled from both research and practice, of the beneficial effects of such a ‘values and wellbeing’ pedagogy.

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

A revolution in education is sweeping across America. Smart Schools, Smart Kids takes readers into dozens of pioneering schools across the country to describe successful programs and how they work, the problems they have encountered, and the results they have achieved. Innovative reformers are transforming every aspect of the "nineteenth-century factory-model school" into a new kind of public school capable of educating kids for twenty-first century challenges. Smart Schools, Smart Kids shows how. It is a book that is sure to be warmly welcomed by parents, teachers, administrators, and public officials alike who want to improve education for their own and for all of America's children. This nation can no longer afford to wait for change: Smart Schools, Smart Kids will make a real difference now. Book jacket.