Professional Paradoxes and School Reforms 1

2021 ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Sam Oh Neill

In 2003, I began a longitudinal study into the purpose of education. The process of my investigation included getting involved in new innovations as they were introduced to our school board. As I looked deeper into the purpose of schooling I discovered some startling things about how and why systems of education, through the apparatus of schooling, influence who and what, professionally, people become. I also discovered patterns related to the act of becoming that exist in school reforms. This study analyzes three reforms introduced between 2003 and 2017: Professional Learning Community, Differentiation of Instruction, and Social-Emotional Learning. 


2019 ◽  
pp. 71-81
Author(s):  
Lidia Pawelec

The present text outlines the school reforms carried out in the first half of the nineteenth century. As the timeframe suggests, these reforms were launched and implemented by the then authorities of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Russian authorities administering the Russian part of partitioned Poland. The author attempts to indicate the most important goals and assumptions of thereforms as well as their immediate educational and social consequences. The text is far from being a comprehensive description of the problem but rather serves as an introduction to the substance of the issue under investigation and its political and economic conditioning.


1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilbert C. Hentschke
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Chester E. Finn ◽  
Andrew E. Scanlan

This chapter assesses how the nation's largest school district, New York City, is tackling its own Advanced Placement (AP) challenge. In 2018, the city's Department of Education (DOE) housed more AP students than all but a dozen states. It is therefore not surprising that the challenge of effecting any major change in how AP works in Gotham is gargantuan when placed alongside a city like Fort Worth. Yet the story of AP in the Big Apple shares many of the same dynamics seen in Texas. As recently as 2015–16, more than a hundred of the city's four-hundred-plus high schools offered no AP courses at all—and many of those schools are located in poor neighborhoods full of African American, Hispanic, and immigrant youngsters. Over the years, municipal leaders sought in various ways to rectify this obvious inequity, even as they undertook myriad other high school reforms. One such growth initiative came in September of 2013, when the DOE joined forces with the College Board and the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) to launch an “AP Expansion” program meant to last three years. Two years later, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared—as part of his own ambitious education initiatives—that AP would be introduced into every high school that did not already have it. The chapter then analyzes in detail these two citywide initiatives, including their early results and some lessons that may be drawn from their experience to date.


2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick M. Hess ◽  
Michael Q. McShane

Drawing upon their new edited volume of essays looking back on the school reforms of the Bush and Obama years, the authors explain just how few of those reforms went according to plan. Some of the unexpected outcomes were positive, they note, pointing to the improvement of school data systems and the bipartisan compromise that put an end to No Child Left Behind. Some of them were negative, such as a public backlash against achievement testing in general and the implementation of the Common Core in particular. And all of them should lead reformers to question their own certainty about how their policy ideas will play out.


Social Forces ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanno Kruse

Abstract Between-school ability tracking—the assignment of students to different school types based on their prior achievement—is usually associated with increased ethnic segregation across schools. This article argues that stronger between-school ability tracking is not only associated with stronger ethnic sorting into school types, thus increasing segregation. At the same time, it hampers majority flight, majority members’ avoidance of exposure to minority members, thus decreasing segregation. To identify the two-fold effect of tracking the article exploits a unique feature of the German secondary school system: regional variation in the strength of between-school ability tracking. Analyses rely on administrative data entailing geocoded information on all secondary schools in Germany in 2008/2009. Results corroborate expectations of a two-fold effect: there is indication that between-school ability tracking increases segregation via more sorting into tracks while at the same time decreasing it via less school sorting within each track and via less spatial sorting. This suggests that school reforms changing tracked school systems into more comprehensive school systems may have a weaker desegregating impact than expected.


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