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How Well Are American Students Learning?
The Brown Center Report on American Education provides an accurate, nonpartisan, data-driven account of American elementary and secondary education. Its purpose is four-fold: to determine the direction of achievement in U.S. public schools; to gauge the significance of changes; to uncover the policies and practices influencing the direction of student achievement; and finally, to figure out whether the public is getting the full story on student learning. This year’s report tackles perennial questions of how to interpret trends in test scores, the distribution of achievement, school turnarounds, and charter schools. It examines national test data going back to 1971 from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compares the 1989 and 2009 test scores of more than 1,000 schools, and compares the test scores of conversion charter schools from 1986 to those from 2008.
How Well Are American Students Learning?
An overarching theme of this year’s report is that events in the field of education are not always as they appear to be—and especially so with test scores. Whether commentators perpetrating myths of international testing, states winning races while evidencing only mediocre progress, or an eighth grade test dominated by content below the eighth grade, the story is rarely as simple as it appears on first blush. This report digs beneath the surface and uncover some of the complexities of these important issues.
Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews
Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere.
When the Dar es Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of Academics came up in the early 1990s, African higher-education systems were in a serious, multi-dimensional and long-standing crisis. Hand-in-hand with the imbalances and troubles that rocked and ruined African economies, the crisis in the academia was characterised by the collapse of infrastructures, inadequate teaching personnel and poor staff development and motivation. It was against this background that the questions of academic freedom and the responsibilities and autonomy of institutions of higher-learning were raised in the Dar es Salaam Declaration. In February 2005, the University of Dar es Salaam Staff Association (UDASA), in cooperation with CODESRIA, organised a workshop to bring together the staff associations of some public and private universities in Tanzania, in order to renew their commitment to the basic principles of the Dar es Salaam Declaration and its sister document - the Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility. The workshop was also aimed at re-invigorating the social commitment of African intellectuals. The papers included in this volume reflect the depth and potentials of the debates that took place during the workshop. The volume is published in honour of Chachage Seithy L. Chachage, who was an active part of the workshop but unfortunately passed away in 2006.
Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today
Franklin considers how academic memoirs have engaged with a core of defining concerns in the humanities: identity politics and the development of whiteness studies in the 1990s; the impact of postcolonial studies; feminism and concurrent anxieties about pedagogy; and disability studies and the struggle to bring together discourses on the humanities and human rights. The turn back toward humanism that Franklin finds in some academic memoirs is surreptitious or frankly nostalgic; others, however, posit a wide-ranging humanism that seeks to create space for advocacy in the academic and other institutions in which we are all unequally located. These memoirs are harbingers for the critical turn to explore interrelations among humanism, the humanities, and human rights struggles.
How Faculty Manage Work and Family
Academic Motherhood tells the story of over one hundred women who are both professors and mothers and examines how they navigated their professional lives at different career stages. Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel base their findings on a longitudinal study that asks how women faculty on the tenure track manage work and family in their early careers (pre-tenure) when their children are young (under the age of five), and then again in mid-career (post-tenure) when their children are older. The women studied work in a range of institutional settings—research universities, comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges—and in a variety of disciplines, including the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.
Much of the existing literature on balancing work and family presents a pessimistic view and offers cautionary tales of what to avoid and how to avoid it. In contrast, the goal of Academic Motherhood is to help tenure track faculty and the institutions at which they are employed “make it work.” Writing for administrators, prospective and current faculty as well as scholars, Ward and Wolf-Wendel bring an element of hope and optimism to the topic of work and family in academe. They provide insight and policy recommendations that support faculty with children and offer mechanisms for problem-solving at personal, departmental, institutional, and national levels.
Le présent ouvrage porte plus spécifiquement sur ces enjeux en situation de stage. Il est conçu afin que les divers acteurs de la formation en milieu de pratique – stagiaires, enseignants et professionnels du milieu scolaire, superviseurs et formateurs universitaires – y trouvent des repères importants pour leur dialogue. Leurs perceptions et leurs attentes à l’égard de leurs rôles respectifs sont mis en lumière, à partir de résultats de recherches, de recensions d’écrits et de réflexions systématiques. Des aspects technologiques jusqu’aux dimensions éthiques, en passant par les enjeux relationnels et identitaires, les auteurs proposent au lecteur un riche questionnement sur les pratiques de supervision, des perspectives originales sur l’apprentissage en contexte de la profession et des pistes concrètes pour un accompagnement concerté des stagiaires en enseignement.
Pour s'approprier une réforme en éducation
Comment favoriser l'implantation d'un changement en éducation comme celui de la réforme québécoise actuelle ? Comment intervenir dans une approche socioconstructiviste de l'apprentissage ? Les auteures de ce livre proposent aux personnes intervenant auprès des enseignantes et des enseignants, aux directions d'école, aux services pédagogiques et à tout autre secteur engagé dans ce processus, un programme de formation à l'accompagnement socioconstructiviste illustré par 15 activités qui permettent de s'approprier un changement comme celui prôné par le programme de formation de l'école québécoise. Les activités présentées concernent autant le développement de bases conceptuelles que la réflexion sur des pratiques, le partage d'expériences et la modélisation de la démarche d'accompagnement.
The Impact on Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students
For years, school reform efforts targeted either students in regular education or those with special needs, but not both. As a result of the No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB) and its focus on accountability, administrators established policies that would integrate the needs of students who previously were served under separate frameworks. Using the NCLB structure as a starting point, Stephanie W. Cawthon’s new book Accountability-Based Reforms: The Impact on Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students discusses key assumptions behind accountability reforms. She specifically examines how elements of these reforms affect students who are deaf or hard of hearing, their teachers, and their families. Cawthon begins by providing a brief introduction to the deaf education context, offering detailed information on student demographics, settings, and academic outcomes for deaf students. She then outlines the evolution of accountability-based education reforms, following with a chapter on content standards, assessment accommodations, accountability as sanctions, and students with disabilities. The remaining chapters in Accountability-Based Reforms closely examine educational professionals, accountability, and students who are deaf or hard of hearing; school choice policies and parents; and deaf education and measures of success. Each chapter presents an overview of an important component of accountability reform, available research, and how it has been implemented in the United States. These chapters also offer recommendations for future action by educators, parents, researchers, and education policymakers.
