Public School Education

An investigative study of the far-right’s attack on education and an on-the-ground look at the parent activist battle, on either side of the debate, to control the future of public schools For well over a century, public schools have been a non-partisan gathering place and vital center of...

Decades ago, we systematically removed religious education from the public school day. LifeWise Academy is bringing it back. During School Hours is the two-part (true) story of how it's happening right now. Part 1 investigates WHY religious education was removed from public schools, the unintended consequences of its removal, and why reinstalling it is a game-changer for future generations. Part 2 shows exactly HOW LifeWise Academy is doing it now - bringing Bible education to public school students During School Hours.

This book argues that the structure of public education is a key factor in the failure of America's public education system to fulfill the intellectual, civic, and moral aims for which it was created. The book challenges the philosophical basis for the traditional common school model and defends the educational pluralism that most liberal democracies enjoy. Berner provides a unique theoretical pathway that is neither libertarian nor state-focused and a pragmatic pathway that avoids the winner-takes-all approach of many contemporary debates about education.

Efforts to address inequities within our schools tend to ignore the underlying beliefs that sustain injustices, and focus instead on short-lived policies and practices. This book takes a different approach to eradicating educational disparities. Drawing on more than 40 interviews with teachers, principals, and district leaders, Manya C. Whitaker offers educators guidance for leading a school or district grounded in social justice that centers teachers - not just teaching practices - and that focuses on the belief systems that shape decision-making.

At a time when Americans are debating the future of public education, Johann N. Neem tells the inspiring story of how and why Americans built a robust public school system in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. It’s a story in which ordinary people in towns across the country worked together to form districts and build schoolhouses and reformers sought to expand tax support and give every child a liberal education. By the time of the Civil War, most northern states had made common schools free, and many southern states were heading in the same direction.

Objectively, one could argue that the government schools are fine. If you ignore the schools' complete inability to educate children, they are doing fine indeed. This book exposes the lies you've been told from cradle to grave about the worst educational system on the planet. You also learn the only reasonable option available to all parents who love their children. YES, the answer is here. For any and all parents, single or married. And the answer to protect your children is simple and virtually free.

Since the early Egyptians, human beings have formalized the business of learning, setting up a designated environment of some form to pass knowledge and learning on to groups of students. In this second edition of his Very Short Introduction, Gary Thomas explores how and why education has evolved as it has, examining the ways in which it has responded over the centuries to various influences in politics, philosophy, and the social sciences.

In Testing Education, Kathy Greeley recounts the impact of education reform from a teacher's point of view. Based on a teaching career ranging nearly forty years, Greeley details how schools went from learning communities infused with excitement, intellectual stimulation, and joy to sterile spaces of stress, intimidation, and fear. In this ultimately hopeful memoir, Greeley asks us to learn from the past to reimagine the future of public education.

This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her...

Saving Schools traces the story of the rise, decline, and potential resurrection of American public schools through the lives and ideas of six mission-driven reformers: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Shanker, William Bennett, and James Coleman. Yet schools did not become the efficient, egalitarian, and high-quality educational institutions these reformers envisioned. Indeed, the unintended consequences of their legacies shaped today's flawed educational system.

“This book merits every American’s serious consideration” (Vice President Joe Biden): from the Secretary of Education under President Obama, an exposé of the status quo that helps maintain a broken system at the expense of our kids’ education, and threatens our nation’s future...

Can money buy high-quality education? Studies find only a weak relationship between public school funding and educational outcomes. In The Money Myth, W. Norton Grubb proposes a powerful paradigm shift in the way we think about why some schools thrive and others fail. The greatest inequalities in America's schools lie in factors other than fiscal support. Fundamental differences in resources other than money explain the deepening divide in the success of our nation's schoolchildren.

In Educational Pluralism and American Democracy, education policy expert Ashley Rogers Berner envisions a K-12 education system that serves both the individual and the common good. Calling for education reform that will enable US public schools to fulfill the longstanding promise of American education, Berner proposes a radical reimagining of both the structure and content of US public school systems. She urges policymakers to embrace educational pluralism, an internationally common model in which the government funds diverse types of schools that deliver more universal content.

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.