While much mainstream educational research maintains that teacher unions should be outlawed or their powers greatly reduced, Bascia and her contributors, including many of the leading teacher union researchers working today, challenge this position. Instead, they recognize the important role teacher unions must play in defending public education and in minimizing the damage wrought by ill-thought-out educational policies. By avoiding idealization of these organizations and recognizing their limitations, Teacher Unions in Public Education demonstrates the necessity for union renewal for a successful education system.

Teachers’ unions have long been controversial and divisive organizations, but criticism and distrust of them may be at an all-time high. This volume considers the prevailing assumption that unions successfully block change in education because they are primarily motivated to protect members’ interests. It challenges the conceptualization of teacher union motivation and provides a more nuanced account of unions’ interests, power and impact. Through a series of international cases from the United States, Finland and the Canton of Zürich, this volume examines the hot-button issue of performance-related pay reform and compensation. It argues that a better understanding of the union-management relationship may be the key to securing more meaningful change and reform. It will be of use to scholars, policy-makers, union leaders, teachers and citizens who are interested in the possibilities for the union-management relationship, rather than the limitations.

A heated debate is raging over our nation’s public schools and how they should be reformed, with proposals ranging from imposing national standards to replacing public education altogether with a voucher system for private schools. Combining decades of experience in education, the authors propose an innovative approach to solving the problems of our school system and find a middle ground between these extremes. Reinventing Public Education shows how contracting would radically change the way we operate our schools, while keeping them public and accessible to all, and making them better able to meet standards of achievement and equity. Using public funds, local school boards would select private providers to operate individual schools under formal contracts specifying the type and quality of instruction. In a hands-on, concrete fashion, the authors provide a thorough explanation of the pros and cons of school contracting and how it would work in practice. They show how contracting would free local school boards from operating schools so they can focus on improving educational policy; how it would allow parents to choose the best school for their children; and, finally, how it would ensure that schools are held accountable and academic standards are met. While retaining a strong public role in education, contracting enables schools to be more imaginative, adaptable, and suited to the needs of children and families. In presenting an alternative vision for America’s schools, Reinventing Public Education is too important to be ignored.

In this blistering critique of our failing public schools, Lieberman explains why public education is in irreversible and terminal decline and tells what we must do to get American schooling back on track. A refreshingly clear analysis of our educational crisis and a rallying cry for market-system approaches to school reform.

From pressure to "teach to the test" and the use of quantitative metrics to define education "quality," to the rise of "school choice" and the shift of principals from colleagues to managers, teachers in New York, Mexico City, and Toronto have experienced strikingly similar challenges to their professional autonomy. By visiting schools and meeting teachers, government officials, and union leaders, Paul Bocking identifies commonalities that are shaping how teachers' work and public schools function. While arguing that neoliberal education policy is a dominant trend transcending the realities of school districts, states, or national governments, Bocking also demonstrates the importance of local context to explain variations in education governance, especially when understanding the role of resistance led by teachers' unions.

At this moment, schools are doing everything they can to win the Race to the Top. They are allocating their funding to test preparation, riffing beloved teachers, and transferring students who “drag down” their grade average on the state report card. This book describes the current state of the education system in the United States. Readers will be on the front lines of the protests in Madison, in the inner city public-turned-charter schools, and in the shoes of the teachers dealing with educational politics every day. By the end of this text, you may beg the question: who’s winning in the Race to the Top?

This study focuses on governance of K-12 public schools. Governance - the work of institutions that set the rules under which schools must operate - can protect children and prevent misuse of public funds, but it can also prevent teachers and principals from doing their best for children. There are proposals to simplify governance changing by giving control to mayors, eliminating elected school boards, or eliminating local oversight entirely. This book approaches governance from a new angle: who governs is less important than what powers government has.

"Twenty-eight eminent essayists remind our nations parents, educators, school board members and politicians that our democracy is in jeopardy and that our nation's system of free universal public education is also under attack. If that attack succeeds, American democracy itself would be further imperiled. That is because American democracy rests on a belief that the power of our government comes from the people, and the diffusion of knowledge and the enlightenment of the people has been a cornerstone of our democracy since the founding of our republic. America's public schools, therefore, have a special mandate"--

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Leadership and Administration presents the most recent theories, research, terms, concepts, ideas, and histories on educational leadership and school administration as taught in preparation programs and practiced in schools and colleges today. With more than 600 entries, written by more than 200 professors, graduate students, practitioners, and association officials, the two volumes of this encyclopedia represent the most comprehensive knowledge base of educational leadership and school administration that has, as yet, been compiled.