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Educational Improvement

• A Framework for Identifying Consensus: Agreement and Disagreement among Teacher Education Reform Documents
  This study offers a framework for identifying areas of agreement and disagreement across eight recent teacher education reform documents. Researchers analyzed each document in relation to the reform principles proposed by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF).
• Becoming a Multicultural Teacher
  Considers how being a multicultural teacher demands facing a lengthy and complex set of issues, beginning with the understanding that good multicultural teaching has the bottom-line goal of helping every child be successful in the classroom. Presents 10 recommendations for reaching that goal.
• Conditions, Concessions, and the Many Tender Mercies of Learning through Multicultural Literature
  Explores how students constructed their own texts and meanings when they were required to read, interpret, and critique unfamiliar text written about underrepresented people. Presents the concepts "conditions," "concessions," and many "tender mercies" of learning through multicultural literature when presented as new literature to a heterogeneous mix of students.
• Democratic Dispositions and Cultural Competency: Ingredients for School Renewal
  This article argues that the current school reform movement of high-stakes testing is misguided. It advocates that democratic dispositions and cultural competency be included in the major goals of schooling and proposes that the purpose of schooling should be determined through public deliberation within diverse communities.
• Designing for diversity in school success: Capitalizing on culture
  This paper notes the potential of capitalizing on cultural traits to improve the learning of diverse students. It outlines strengths that culturally diverse populations possess that could enhance their success in the learning environment and offers recommendations to assist in helping educators to implement changes to accommodate learners' needs.
• Effective Professional Development Schools. Agenda for Education in a Democracy Series. Volume 3
  This book presents a theoretical basis for Professional Development Schools (PDSs) as well as practical guidance for establishing, funding, and evaluating them. It offers a comprehensive view of the role that PDSs play in today's educational renewal efforts and insights about the potential that a quality PDS can bring to learning at many levels.
• Fulfilling the Promise of Access and Opportunity: Collaborative Community Colleges for the 21st Century. New Expeditions: Charting the Second Century of Community Colleges. Issues Paper No. 3
  This document is part of the New Expeditions series, published by the American Association of Community Colleges. Addressed specifically in this paper is the need for collaboration within and between community colleges if they are to fulfill their role as democratic agencies concerned with access and equity issues.
• Fulfilling the Promise of Access and Opportunity: Collaborative Community Colleges for the 21st Century. New Expeditions: Charting the Second Century of Community Colleges. Issues Paper No. 3
  This document is part of the New Expeditions series, published by the American Association of Community Colleges. Addressed specifically in this paper is the need for collaboration within and between community colleges if they are to fulfill their role as democratic agencies concerned with access and equity issues.
• Fulfilling the Promise of Access and Opportunity: Collaborative Community Colleges for the 21st Century. New Expeditions: Charting the Second Century of Community Colleges. Issues Paper No. 3
  This document is part of the New Expeditions series, published by the American Association of Community Colleges. Addressed specifically in this paper is the need for collaboration within and between community colleges if they are to fulfill their role as democratic agencies concerned with access and equity issues.
• Global Education as a Strategy for School Improvement
  Outlines the processes, and some of the obstacles encountered in promoting global education within the schools. Identifies the most prominent obstacle as competing demands for time and resources.
• Hope for urban education: A study of nine high-performing, high-poverty, urban elementary schools.
  This report tells the stories of nine urban elementary schools that served children of color in poor communities and achieved impressive academic results. All of the schools used federal Title I dollars to create Title I school wide programs.
• Learning Me Your...Science Language
  Demonstrates how science instruction can only be effective when teachers are aware of differences in children's language and their culture. The author argues that it is important to recognize when linguistic or cultural understandings lead children to wrong answers that to them seem totally logical.
• Multicultural Education and Culture Change: An Anthropological Perspective
  Discusses the difficulty inherent in teaching multiculturalism within a nation as culturally diverse and changing as the United States. Teaching cultural awareness from an anthropological perspective is explored.
• Raising Achievement for Asian Pupils
  Analyzes why ethnic minority groups, such as Asians, are achieving marginal academic success. Analysis of the management, pedagogic, curriculum, resource, and community issues indicates what political guidance might be effective to help improve academic achievement.
• Reaching All Families: Creating Family-Friendly Schools
  Recognizing the critical role parents have in developing their children's learning habits, this booklet offers strategies that focus on ways principals and teachers can communicate with diverse families about: (1) school goals, programs, activities, and procedures; (2) the progress of individual students; and (3) home activities which can improve children's school learning.
• Reinventing Early Care and Education: A Vision for a Quality System
  Although early care and education have gained some momentum in recent years, shortfalls in quality are still pervasive. This book defines the elements of a high-quality system and suggests strategies for improvement.
• Rethinking Preservice Preparation for Teachers in the Learning Disabilities Field: Workable Multicultural Strategies
  Discusses problems and controversies associated with preservice teacher education curricular reform, teacher preparation programs and the learning disabilities field, and restructuring teacher preparation programs to prepare teachers to work with culturally diverse students with learning disabilities. Recruitment and retention of culturally diverse students and personnel is emphasized.
• Rethinking Preservice Preparation for Teachers in the Learning Disabilities Field: Workable Multicultural Strategies
  Discusses problems and controversies associated with preservice teacher education curricular reform, teacher preparation programs and the learning disabilities field, and restructuring teacher preparation programs to prepare teachers to work with culturally diverse students with learning disabilities. Recruitment and retention of culturally diverse students and personnel is emphasized.
• Standards and Practices: Children's Literature and Curricula Reform for the Twenty-First Century
  Maintains that implementing the new social studies curriculum standards has been a challenge for many elementary teachers. Asserts that high-quality children's literature is essential for an integrated, multicultural curriculum.
• Steps to Creative Campus Collaboration. Invited Paper
  The issues of what to do about the flaws in our current system of higher education are based in our beliefs about the purposes of higher education. Which educational approaches best serve our society in this era? What values, skills, and knowledge do we want students to examine or learn in their college experience? What processes of teaching and learning will help us meet our goals and fulfill our values?.
• Steps to Creative Campus Collaboration. Invited Paper
  The issues of what to do about the flaws in our current system of higher education are based in our beliefs about the purposes of higher education. Which educational approaches best serve our society in this era? What values, skills, and knowledge do we want students to examine or learn in their college experience?.
• Struggling To Be Heard: The Unmet Needs of Asian Pacific American Children
  Essays in this volume address the neglect of Asian Pacific Americans in the United States, of their struggles for liberation, hopes, troubles, and personal identities. This collection reviews Asian Pacific American history and explores attitudes about the welfare of Asian Pacific American families.
• Struggling To Be Heard: The Unmet Needs of Asian Pacific American Children
  Essays in this volume address the neglect of Asian Pacific Americans in the United States, of their struggles for liberation, hopes, troubles, and personal identities. This collection reviews Asian Pacific American history and explores attitudes about the welfare of Asian Pacific American families.
• Student Diversity, Choice, and School Improvement
  This book examines research about trends affecting public school diversity, improvement, and choice. It finds that schools with socioeconomically and racially diversified student bodies are more effective learning communities than schools that are poverty-concentrated and racially homogenous.
• The new meaning of educational change
  This book has been greatly revised and expanded to make it a definitive up-to-date reference for educational innovators involved in educational reform.
• The Place of Political Education in the Classroom
  Demonstrates the ability of children to understand global and political issues in a framework of interdependency and justice, as established in the "Children and Worldviews" Project. Children's responses and thinking are provided as well as examples of classroom strategies.
• Tomorrow's schools of education: A report of the Holmes Group
  This report contains nine chapters: "A New Beginning"; "The Heart of the Matter: Three Kinds of Development"; "Special Knowledge for Educators"; "Participating in Policy Development"; "Commitment to Diversity"; "Human Resources: Making People Matter"; "The Core of Learning: What All Educators Must Know"; "The Professional Development School: Integral to Tomorrow's School of Education"; and "New Commitments and New Kinds of Accountability for the TSE." To correct the problem of uneven quality in the education and screening of educators for U.S. schools, the report proposes an altered mission for schools of education.
• Tomorrow's schools of education: A report of the Holmes Group
  Among the challenges are the following: the education school's curriculum should focus on the learning needs of the young and development of educators at various stages of their careers; university faculties should include teachers, practitioners, and other individuals who are at home working in public schools; programs that prepare school personnel and teacher educators need to actively recruit, retain, and graduate a more ethnically diverse student body; faculty and students in schools of education should work predominantly in professional development schools rather than on college campuses; education schools should join together to form an interconnecting set of networks at local, state, regional, and national levels to ensure better work and accountability.
• Uncertainty and decision making in teaching: Implications for managing line professionals
  Most of this book's 22 chapters were written as background papers that were presented at a national conference on restructuring schooling held at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, August 18-21, 1987. Framing the chapters of this book is the notion that if rational management systems and theoretical treatises about promoting school excellence do not take into account the realities of the workplace; they will not bring about sustained improvements in our nation's schools.
• Urban Schools Rethink Themselves: Developing Instructional Skills in the Process of Change
  Explores aspects of professional development within the Accelerated Schools model and suggests ways to realize teacher's potential for strengthening the mediational skills that are critical to quality education. Additionally, examines examples of the impact on teacher performance and of training that promotes research and inquiry.
• What are schools for
  Problems of schooling in the United States are explored in the monograph. Major educational problems are grouped in two categories--confusion over educational objectives and a rush to solve vaguely understood educational problems with ill-conceived action.