First Published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is not a comprehensive history of moral education in American schools. Rather, it is an episodic history that deals with selected periods, movements, and individuals throughout the course of American education history from the time of colonial Massachusetts in the 17th century up to present times. It is almost entirely devoted to public schools. It is a tale that is fraught with friction and controversy, even legal challenge. Given the nature of the topic, and the passion with which it has been and is currently viewed, it will ever be thus.

This book provides an invaluable resource for school teachers, administrators, board members, policy makers, and citizens who would like to understand what's behind performance pay, what might work and what will not, and how to build a school improvement effort that includes teacher compensation as one of its strategies.

This text helps current and aspiring administrators, teachers, and curriculum directors successfully restructure, enhance, and implement school K–12 curriculum. Now in its Fifth Edition, this foundational book highlights 21st century educational ideas and advocacy, while also remaining focused on tried and true strategies for meeting state and national standards in today’s diverse classrooms. With the support of this thought-provoking and extensively researched text, readers will develop a working and thorough foundation of curriculum to effectively implement in the classrooms of the future.

This book calls for moving teachers to the center of decision-making in public schools. It honors teaching and teachers by redefining the role in a democratically organized professional setting. While modern reform employs the language of school restructuring, genuine change that will enhance the status of teachers is not at the top of the agenda. This book recognizes that for authentic empowerment to materialize, the nature of the teaching role must significantly change. At the same time, teacher preparation will also have to be overhauled in order to equip teachers with all that a new status demands. It also proposes that the role of the principal must be dramatically transformed and recommends returning principals to the teaching function as part of their task and places them in greater accountability to the professional teaching staff itself. The book presents a hopeful message that is grounded in a progressive perspective our conservative epoch demands.

Educators will find more than sixty strategies and reflections to help guide the success of any new or experienced school leader. Beginning with methods of assessing the organization's culture, the book expands on ways to empower staff, students, and community members to embrace change. It is filled with creative approaches that make more out of less, work with individuals from an asset model, and assess results. This book examines the process used by one Colorado school to achieve two, five-year visions and to change its image in the community. Once staff, students, parents, and community stakeholders "catch the vision," programs, people and resources are aligned to promote success. As a result, the school, once slated for the financial chopping block, effectively moved from potential closure to national recognition as an exemplary program. Like its unique programs, most of the visions strategies can be replicated and adapted to any organizational setting. For aspiring or veteran principals or school leaders.

This book presents a new framework for how teachers develop their assessment capacity, based on a multi-year study conducted in four countries—Australia, Canada, England, and New Zealand—which focused on student-teacher learning in assessment throughout their initial teacher education programs. It examines how teacher learning is shaped by the complex dynamics of assessment capacity within larger teacher education contexts. The framework proposed here identifies four domains involved in cultivating assessment capacity and characterizes assessment learning as always integrating cognitive, philosophical, and moral dimensions with assessment’s social, emotional, and physical dimensions, while recognizing that each capacity is continually shaped by the learning context. The book draws on the survey of teacher education programs in each of the four focal countries and data from student teachers to shed light on how the various pedagogies, program structures, and policies encountered provide beginning teachers with codes for classifying and framing assessment capacity and form a template for developing this capacity throughout their careers. Offering suggestions for future research and teacher education practice, the book concludes with an outlook on future steps to cultivate teachers’ assessment capacity.

Reform of American education is largely motivated by concerns about our economic competitiveness and American's standard of living. Yet, few if any of the public school reform agendas incorporate economic principles or research findings. Improving America's Schools explores how education and economic research can help produce, in the words of Harvard's Dale W. Jorgenson, "a unified framework for future education reform." This book presents the perspectives of noted experts, including Eric A. Hanushek, author of Making Schools Work, on creating incentives for improved school and student performance; Under Secretary of Education Marshall S. Smith on the Clinton Administration's reform program; and Rebecca Maynard, University of Pennsylvania, on the education of the disadvantaged. This volume explores these areas: The importance of schooling to labor market success. The prospects for combining school-based management with teacher incentives to gain the best of both approaches. The potential of recent innovations in student achievement testing, including new "value-added" indicators. The economic factors involved in maintaining an adequate stock of effective teachers. The volume also explores why, despite similar standards of living, France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the United States produce different levels of education achievement. Improving America's Schools informs the current debate over school reform with a fresh perspective, examples, and data. This readable volume will be of interest to policymakers, researchers, educators, and education administrators as well as economists and employersâ€"it is also readily accessible to concerned parents and the larger community.