Browse

Agile Faculty is a faculty development book that introduces strategies to help faculty improve their goal-setting, productivity, vitality, and career satisfaction. To do so, the book adapts the Scrum project management framework popular in software development. Scrum is a framework for dividing large projects into smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a short amount of time. The Scrum roles, meetings, strategies, and terminology can easily be adapted to faculty work in research, service, and teaching, and this work can be individual or collaborative. Faculty often juggle multiple projects and responsibilities including completing research, serving on committees, designing and teaching classes, and mentoring students and peers. Faculty can experience stress when these responsibilities compete for their time. Faculty can benefit from a set of flexible and adaptable strategies to achieve meaningful personal and professional goals. Scrum is considered an Agile framework. Agile is an umbrella term for a set of human-centered project management values and principles. The Agile values of focus, commitment, openness, courage, and respect align with faculty values. Agile Faculty introduces everything faculty readers need to know about the basics of Agile and Scrum and includes chapters with advice and specific strategies to improve how faculty approach different aspects of their research, service, and teaching priorities. The goal of Agile Faculty is to help faculty readers determine their most meaningful personal and professional goals and to use the Agile and Scrum strategies outlined in the book to make regular incremental progress toward their highest priorities for career satisfaction.

The book is a collection of essays about ethical issues arising in selective higher education. The chapters, all by distinguished scholars, including one eminent university president, address the following issues: what are the proper aims of the university and what role do the liberal arts play in fulfilling those aims?: what is the justification of the humanities; how should we conceive of critical reflection, and how should we teach it to our students?; how should professors approach their intellectual relationship with their students?; how should academics approach the problems raised by social epistemology (like the novice-expert problem) in their curriculum design and pedagogical practices?; what obligations do elite institutions have to correct for the contribution they have made, over time, to racial inequality?; and how can the university serve as a model of justice for its students? It concludes with a brief essay suggesting further avenues for research.

This book examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in two southern states, North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research that explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of that work at the state and local level, and the voices of southerners, including those in rural black communities, the book demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South and challenges us to re-evaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Foundation leaders were self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education, efforts they believed critical in the South, and black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education that would bring isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schooling served as an important site for expanding state and local governance capacity. It provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and affect black agency in the process. Because foundations could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in local black communities, collaboration between foundation agents and local citizens was necessary to education reform and had the potential to open political opportunity structures in rural areas. Unfortunately, that potential was difficult to realize because foundations were less effective at implementing programs consistently in local areas.

Competition around U.S. college admissions, particularly at the most selective colleges and universities, has never been greater, and recent research suggests that where one attends college matters in terms of persistence, graduation, and future opportunities. In this high-stakes environment, parents and students in affluent secondary schools approach preparation for selective admissions as an “arms race,” seeking out opportunities and experiences to differentiate themselves from the rest of college applicants. Drawing upon ethnographic data collected from a purposefully selected tri-school sample of students, parents, and school personnel, Class Warfare peers underneath the “sacred moment” of the college admissions process, offering a worm's eye view of the day-to day and week-by-week struggles over class positioning as engaged by differentially located class and race actors in public and private privileged secondary schools in early 21^st century United States. The college admissions process represents the culmination of intentionally waged “class work” that is linked to an envisioned battleground over forms of privilege represented by admission to particular kinds of postsecondary destinations. Class Warfare details the extent to which and the ways in which parents, school counselors, teachers, and students at three iconic, privileged, secondary schools in the United States work to “lock in” the next generation's privileged class status via the postsecondary admissions process, illuminating the ways in which sector of secondary school, student position in the opportunity structure of the school, and degree of parent/student closeness to the habitus embedded within particularly located privileged institutions shape “class work” and future class structure.

Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. This book takes a synoptic view of Paley's many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley's thinking while revealing the seminal characteristics of her teaching philosophy. This analysis leads the text to identify a pedagogical model organized around two complementary principles: a curriculum that promotes play and imagination, and the idea of classrooms as fair places where young children of every color, ability, and disposition are welcome.

Aspiring college students and their families have many options. A student can attend an in-state or an out-of-state school, a public or private college, a two-year community college program or a four-year university program. Students can attend full time and have a bachelor of arts degree by the age of twenty-three or mix college and work, progressing toward a degree more slowly. To make matters more complicated, the array of financial aid available is more complex than ever. Students and their families must weigh federal grants, state merit scholarships, college tax credits, and college savings accounts, to name just a few. This book shows how students and their families really make college decisions—how they respond to financial aid options, how peer relationships figure in the decision-making process, and even whether they need mentoring to get through the admissions process. Students of all sorts are considered—from poor students, who may struggle with applications and with deciding whether to continue on to college, to high-aptitude students who are offered “free rides” at elite schools. The book utilizes the best methods and latest data to analyze the college decision-making process, while explaining how changes in aid and admissions practices inform those decisions as well.

Why do white students have better test scores than black students in American schools? In this engaging book, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer this vexing question with novel historical evidence, and show that we must understand its origins to make further progress in closing the racial achievement gap. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind, the pernicious idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior, they show how philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume helped construct it, how it shaped American schooling, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass and Anna Julia Cooper debunked the Color of Mind, and worked to undo its adverse impact on black educational achievement and attainment. Rejecting the view that white and black student differences in achievement are a product of the Color of Mind, Darby and Rury argue that the racial achievement gap has been socially constructed. Because the Color of Mind is reinforced in tracking, discipline, and special education practices, school leaders must work to correct this. While we cannot expect them to solve social problems of poverty, inequality, and segregation, which also affect student achievement, a just society demands that they address the systemic school practices that reinforce contemporary manifestations of racist ideas. This is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, and afford all kids the dignity they deserve.

What types of friendship networks do students form? Who forms which type? What academic and social outcomes are attached to them? And how they impact students after college? These are some of the issues this book considers as it follows Alberto, Mary, Martin, and their peers over a five-year period from their undergraduate years at MU into life after college. By investigating the connections among students’ friends, this book identifies three types of friendship networks—tight-knitters, compartmentalizers, and samplers. Friendship networks positively and negatively impact students’ academic performance, social experiences, and life after college. And they do so differently across racial, gender, and class backgrounds. In brief, the benefits of friendship are not the same for all friends or for all students. Although friendships can drag down students’ academic success, friendships can also keep students in school, giving them a sense of belonging and enjoyment. This book challenges views of friendships as either helping or harming students by showing how and for whom friends help and hinder. Connecting rich descriptions of students’ experiences with detailed maps of their friendships over time provides a uniquely deep and nuanced lens on the lasting academic and social benefits of friends. This book advances and reorients both conceptualization and empirical investigation by showing how college friendships matter academically and socially, and how they matter differently across social categories. The book also provides suggestions for students, parents, faculty and administrators who seek to help students thrive academically and socially.

Young people are told that college is a place where they will “make friendships that will last a lifetime.” What happens when students arrive on campus and enter a new social world? The Cost of Inclusion delves into this rich moment to explore the ways young people seek out inclusion and its emotive counterpart, a sense of belonging. To illuminate the college social scene, Blake R. Silver spent a year immersed in student life at a large public university. Silver paired ethnographic observation with in-depth interviews with first-year college students in order to understand how individuals searched for and frequently failed to find inclusion in the social realm of higher education. Students sought diverse extracurricular groups where they could connect with others from a variety of backgrounds. However, as many soon realized, finding a sense of belonging in these settings often came at a cost. To be included, students encountered pressure to conform to racist and sexist stereotypes. This book examines how culture shapes identity and self-presentation, generating inequality at the intersections of race and gender. Silver argues that a laissez faire approach to the extracurriculum is undermining student success and marginalizing women and racial/ethnic minority students on campus. Opportunities for colleges and universities to address these disparities are explored.

The book 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. We propose system of “constitutional” limits on what local governing bodies can do, and checks and balances to enforce these limits. The core of the governance system is a local Civic Education Council, a representative democratic body that has unique but also strictly limited powers: to decide what organizations may run schools, but to let individual schools employ teachers and principals; to withdraw support from unproductive schools and to seek better alternatives for children; and to allocate funds to schools based on enrollment but not to create a large central bureaucracy. This maintains local control, but also limits the purview of government action. The book explains constitutional governance in detail and lays out its implications for parents, students, teachers and their unions, state and federal government and the courts. Later chapters address how the laws defining the new system could be stabilized by a combination of structural change in government and political organization.

Education researchers struggle with the fact that students arrive at school already shaped by their unequal childhoods. Would we see greater gains among less privileged students if they had a more level playing field? Matthew Rafalow’s Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era answers this question by studying digital technology use at three middle schools. In the contemporary moment, kids’ digital skills appear in the form of their digital play with peers, like through social media use, video gaming, and creating online media. Drawing on six hundred hours of observation and over one hundred interviews with teachers, administrators, and students, Digital Divisions documents how teachers differently treat these very similar digital forms differently by school demographic. At a school with mostly wealthy and White youth, digital play is seen as a resource that will help in class and prepare students to be the next big tech CEO. At a school for mostly middle class, Asian-American youth, kids’ digital pursuits are seen as threatening to learning and such these activities are routinely punished. At a school for mostly working class, Latinx students, teachers dismiss the value of digital play in favor of rote skills, like keyboarding, that they believe will prepare their students for the contemporary factory floor. While existing work focuses on the role of parenting in shaping cultural inequality, Digital Divisions offers an in-depth portrait of how teachers operate as gatekeepers for students’ potential—and differently by the race and class of their student body.

Students in special education programs can have widely divergent experiences. For some, special education amounts to a dumping ground where schools unload their problem students, while for others, it provides access to services and accommodations that drastically improve chances of succeeding in school and beyond. This book argues that this inequity in treatment is directly linked to the disparity in resources possessed by the students' parents. Since the mid-1970s, federal law has empowered parents of public school children to intervene in virtually every aspect of the decision making involved in special education. However, this book reveals that this power is generally available only to those parents with the money, educational background, and confidence needed to make effective claims about their children's disabilities and related needs. The author documents this class divide by examining evidence including historic rates of learning disability diagnosis, court decisions, and advice literature for parents of disabled children. In an era of expanding special education enrollment, the book provides an analysis of the way this expansion has created new kinds of inequality.

Economists and other researchers have accumulated abundant evidence that education increases workers’ productivity and thus increases their incomes. Education also leads to improvements in health and provides many other non-monetary benefits. Policymakers in developing countries also agree that there are important benefits from increasing the education of their citizens; governments in developing countries now spend about $700 billion each year on education. Despite this increased spending, 13% of children in developing countries do not finish primary school, and over one third do not enroll in secondary school. Even more worrisome is that there is a large amount of evidence that students in developing countries learn far less than students in developed countries. While spending even more money may increase enrollment and learning, most developing countries face serious budget constraints that prevent them from devoting significantly larger amounts of money to education. Thus there is an urgent need to find specific, and relatively inexpensive, policies that will lead to better education outcomes in those countries. Fortunately, there has been a large increase in research on education in developing countries in the last two decades, yet these findings are scattered in many different academic journals and other types of publications. Given this situation, this volume has three goals. The first is to take stock of what this recent research has found. The second is to present the implications of this research for education policies in developing countries. Finally, the third is to set priorities for future research on education in those countries.

Education is a contested topic, and not just politically. For years scholars have approached it from two different points of view: one empirical, focused on explanations for student and school success and failure; and the other philosophical, focused on education's value and purpose within the larger society. Rarely have these separate approaches been brought into the same conversation. This book does just that, offering an intensive discussion by scholars across empirical and philosophical disciplines. The contributors explore how the institutions and practices of education can support democracy by creating the conditions for equal citizenship and egalitarian empowerment, and how they can advance justice by securing social mobility and cultivating the talents and interests of every individual. They then evaluate constraints on achieving the goals of democracy and justice in the educational arena, and identify strategies that we can employ to work through or around those constraints. More than a thorough compendium on a timely and contested topic, the book exhibits an entirely new, deeply composed way of thinking about education as a whole and its importance to a good society.

Educational Goods advances a theory of how to combine values and evidence in decision-making about education. The book identifies three kinds of value that must be balanced against each other: a theory of the kind of educational outcomes schools should aim at; a theory of how educational opportunities should be distributed; and independent values that should be considered when they conflict with the first two kinds of value. The evidence that decision-makers should seek out and consider is that which bears on how these values will be realized through the choices they make, and the book articulates a distinctive method for thinking about the evidence in the light of the values. The method is illustrated through consideration of 3 central policy issues: school financing, school accountability systems, and school choice mechanisms

Math and science hold powerful places in contemporary society, setting the foundations for entry into some of the most robust and highest-paying industries. However, effective math and science education is not equally available to all students, with some of the poorest students—those who would benefit most—going egregiously underserved. This ongoing problem with education highlights one of the core causes of the widening class gap. While this educational inequality can be attributed to a number of economic and political causes, this book demonstrates that it is augmented by a consistent failure to integrate student history, culture, and social needs into the core curriculum. The chapters argue that teachers and schools should create hybrid third spaces—neither classroom nor home—in which underserved students can merge their personal worlds with those of math and science. A host of examples buttress this argument: schools where these spaces have been instituted now provide students with not only an immediate motivation to engage the subjects most critical to their future livelihoods but also the broader math and science literacy necessary for robust societal engagement. The book pushes beyond the idea of teaching for social justice and into larger questions of how and why students participate in math and science.

Throughout American history, the primary mission of public schools has been to prepare students to be effective citizens capable of sustaining a vibrant democracy. Over the past half century, however, most American schools have substantially neglected their responsibility to prepare students for civic participation. For example, in 2016, only 43% of voters under 25 turned out to vote and on the 2014 civics exam administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress only 23% of 18 year-olds performed at or above a “proficient” level. African-American and other students of color tend to experience an even more substantial “civic empowerment gap.” This book examines the causes of the decline in civic preparation, and proposes specific policies that states and school systems can adopt to reinvigorate the schools’ ability to prepare students to function productively as civic participants, and considers examples of best practices. Rebell further argues that this civic decline is also a legal failure—a gross violation of both federal and state constitutions. Building on the precedents in the education adequacy cases that have been litigated in 45 of 50 state courts, and the fact that the vast majority of these courts - and the Supreme Court - have specifically held that preparing students to be capable citizens is a primary purpose of public education, the author argues that adoption of effective solutions by states and school systems will require judicial intervention by both state and federal courts. The book proposes specific legal theories and litigation strategies for such court action.

Transforming Japanese Schools is the first qualitative study of educational reform in Japan produced in almost a decade. Focusing on a collection of reforms collectively known as relaxed education (yutori kyoiku), it scrutinizes recent efforts to reduce academic intensity in Japanese schools. These policiies have provoked intense debates in the country, yet are not well understood outside of Asia. The book moves debates about relaxed education from the halls of government offices to the campuses of six elementary and junior high schools, and pinpoints the specific factors that supported and impeded the Ministry’s reform agenda. It also analyzes the challenges teachers faced as they attempted to adjust their behavior to fit reform guidelines. This ethnographic study of educational reform provides fresh insights into a system that is frequently mischaracterized, sensationalized, and misunderstood. It provides concrete evidence of the consequences of shifting to an examination-centered curriculum. This data provide a much needed balance to ideological arguments about the merits of high stakes testing. The insights generated from this study should be of great interest to individuals involved in any major education reform effort, whether the objective is to reduce academic pressure—or to compel students and teachers to work harder.

Homeschooling—pervasive in colonial times, an anomaly a half century ago, today a national movement—now has a two-faced nature, one ugly and threatening as seen by critics, the other beautiful and wholesome in defenders’ eyes. The reality is that today it is no one thing. Nearly two million American families are doing it, for a great variety of reasons and with a widely divergent range of approaches, by parents whose abilities also vary considerably. The authors posit that homeschooling can be for many children far superior educationally to what the local public schools offer, but also that it can be grossly deficient academically and serve as a cover for serious child maltreatment. After presenting a nuanced historical account of how the practice and public policy of homeschooling has evolved from America’s earliest years to the present, the book analyzes what stance the state ought to take today toward the practice, in light of its potential to be wonderful or worrisome.

The Importance of Being Urban offers several new perspectives on Progressive Era school reform by arguing that educational progressivism manifested itself differently at the local level than at the national level. This distinction can best be seen by examining how local district leaders—termed “district progressives”—embraced a variety of educational reforms considered novel and innovative. District progressives adopted curricula and instructional practices associated with Deweyan notions of pedagogy while they simultaneously implemented intelligence tests and other reforms that epitomized social efficiency and scientific management. During a period of vigorous urban planning, sweeping municipal reorganization, hastened immigration, and a shifting economic and industrial base, urban school districts began to play an increasingly prominent role in urban society, embedding themselves more and more into American urban life and taking responsibility for a much larger slice of the American childhood than ever before. Standard historical narratives tend to divide progressive educators into separate streams of thought, usually distinguishing between pedagogical and administrative progressives, but these divisions mask a more comprehensive understanding of district progressivism and obscure the ways in which districts combined reforms heretofore seen as incongruous and incompatible. By looking across multiple urban school systems, this study demonstrates that district progressivism was a common pattern, not simply representative of an isolated case or two. Moreover, the way local school leaders interpreted democratic education and assessed the potential of non-Anglo children from different national, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds reveals much about the types of schools they ultimately constructed.