Contemporary Studies in Social and Policy Issues in Education: The David C. Anch – serie

Special educators are facing new challenges at the beginning of the 21st century as public education is being reformed by a vision focusing on measurable student outcomes. The future course of the field will be shaped by the policy and programmatic responses to several issues, including demographic changes in student populations, a lack of certified special education teachers, criticism in the public media for the rising costs of services, and debates about the preferred philosophy of service delivery for students with disabilities. Additional chapters discuss university-school collaboration, charter schools, disability studies, school violence, disproportionality in placement, male African-American teachers, and ethics.This book has been written out of a context of research and program development activities with public schools over the past decade in one of the largest Colleges of Education in a diverse metropolitan area in the country. The issues selected for analysis and the perspective guiding those analyses grew out of this work and out of a national Delphi study of the views of parents and constituent organizations and leading researchers, teacher educators, and policy makers in Special Education.

We are in a race against time to save urban children from educational failure and to reform urban school systems before people give up on them. The authors examine the effectiveness of three reform approaches: systems reform, mayoral influence, and external state or federal intervention, using case studies from seven large cities, as well as state and national trends.The social and economic transformation of large American cities after World War II laid the seeds for the crisis in urban education that has festered and grown since the 1950s. Decades of appalling test scores and failure rates, and of unsuccessful piecemeal efforts to improve urban education, have led the public and policymakers to embrace radical solutions to reform.Three approaches to the reform of urban school governance are discussed and analyzed, using data from seven large cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York), national trends, and a statewide analysis of Maryland's school accountability system. The first approach, systems reform, focuses on improving the governance of urban education by overcoming policy fragmentation through standards for student performance, student assessments, and accountability, among other things. Strong mayoral roles offer a second reform approach that largely reverses the Progressive-era reforms of the last century separating schools from city politics. Its supporters believe urban mayors can restore accountability, stability, and political support for urban schools. The third reform approach assumes that external intervention by federal or state authorities is needed to restore accountability and improve system performance.

The primary purpose of this study is to learn from the experiences of schools across the U.S. that are engaged in a largely process-oriented reform strategy. Schools vary in their capacity for productive self-reflection. The authors examine the process of self-assessment that many schools engaged in during this time of widespread public attention to the equlaity of schools. The schools examined in these cases reveal a complex interaction between the nature of the self-reflective activity the schools were engaged in (in this case, a National Education Association school review process entitled KEYS to Success in Schools), the contexts that shape the school, and the readiness on the part of school staff to engage in systematic reflection around issues that affect teaching and learning.The act of self-reflection in schools may not provide, by itself, a source of new ideas, alternative models, and a sense of what might be possible for the school to accomplish. Some external agent can often provide the impetus for (or constrain) the actions of school staffs in examining their programs and capacity for renewal. The acts and outcomes of self-reflection are inevitably guided and/or constrained by various contexts (including the school's history, culture, structure, and supports and pressures provided from communities, districts, and states).

The author explores the ethnic and racial identity formation among high school and college students of racially mixed heritage. The portraits in this book provide a thorough examination of the dynamic ethnic and racial lives of a multifaceted and growing segment of students. Unlike most recent projects on mixed heritage people which are narrow in scope and focus on one set of backgrounds (e.g., black and white or black and Japanese), the subjects in this study represent a vast array of heritages, including those of dual minority ancestry.The students' stories speak volumes about the uneven nature of racial and ethnic experience within and across traditional communities in contemporary U.S. society. Unlike studies analyzing broad intergroup processes, this work begins by examining the cultural dynamics of the home, contributing valuable insights into the otherwise invisible lives of mixed heritage families. Processes of enculturation and discourse acquisition are considered in the development of ethnic identity. The book also helps to frame how changes within the U.S. racial ecology lead many recently mixed heritage individuals to see themselves as occupying (un)common ground. Finally, this work offers recommendations for educators concerned with creating school contexts that are critically supportive of human diversity.

This significant volume studies the growing body of research on home education, and offers a broad analysis of this movement. Introductory chapters present the most current information on the demographics of the movement and on the social and academic outcomes of home education. Beyond these data, the broader implications of the movement are considered in chapters discussing legal issues and policy analysis. Additional chapters provide historical and sociological analysis of the conflicts between parents and schools that often precipitate the decision to home school. The volume ends with an anthropological analysis of learning in the informal home setting and a philosophical critique of the movement as an abandonment of a belief in the efficacy of common schooling.

This significant volume studies the growing body of research on home education, and offers a broad analysis of this movement. Introductory chapters present the most current information on the demographics of the movement and on the social and academic outcomes of home education. Beyond these data, the broader implications of the movement are considered in chapters discussing legal issues and policy analysis. Additional chapters provide historical and sociological analysis of the conflicts between parents and schools that often precipitate the decision to home school. The volume ends with an anthropological analysis of learning in the informal home setting and a philosophical critique of the movement as an abandonment of a belief in the efficacy of common schooling.