Excellence Through Equity is an inspiring look at how real-world educators are creating schools where all students are able to thrive. In these schools, educators understand that equity is not about treating all children the same. They are deeply committed to ensuring that each student receives what he or she individually needs to develop their full potential and succeed. To help educators with what can at times be a difficult and challenging journey, Blankstein and Noguera frame the book with five guiding principles of Courageous Leadership: Getting to your core. Making organizational meaning. Ensuring constancy and consistency of purpose. Facing the facts and your fears. Building sustainable relationships. They further emphasize that the practices are grounded in three important areas of research that are too often disregarded: (1) child development, (2) neuroscience, and (3) environmental influences on child development and learning. You'll hear from Carol Corbett Burris, Michael Fullan, Marcus J. Newsome, Paul Reville, Susan Szachowicz, and other bold practitioners and visionary thinkers who share compelling and actionable ideas, strategies, and experiences for closing the achievement gap in your classrooms and school. Ensuring that all students receive an education that cultivates their talents and potential is in all our common interest. As Andy Hargreaves writes in the coda: ""The opportunity for all Americans is to articulate and believe in an inspiring vision of educational change that is about what the next generation of America and Americans should become, not about a target or ranking that the nation should attain."" From the Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ""Letting go of a system of winners and losers in favor of what is proposed in this book is a courageous leap forward that we all must take together. Let this bold, practical book be a guide; and may you travel into this new exciting vista, in which every child can succeed.

The Canadian provinces have evolved quite different ways of responding to the policy problems posed by religious schools. Seeking to understand this peculiar reality, Faith, Rights, and Choice articulates the ways in which the provincial governance regimes developed for religious schools have changed over time. Covering nearly three centuries, the book begins with the founding of schooling systems in New France and continues into a variety of present-day conflicts that emerged over the question of religion in schools. James Farney and Clark Banack employ a method of process-tracing, drawing on 88 semi-structured interviews with key policy insiders. They also reference archival material documenting meetings, political speeches, and legislative debates related to government decisions around issues of religious education. Relying on the theoretical foundations of both historical institutionalism and Canadian political development, Faith, Rights, and Choice presents a new analytic framework to help make sense of the policy divergence witnessed across Canada.

In his 2011 ASCD best-seller Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, author Mike Schmoker described a fresh approach to K-12 teaching built on three core elements: a focused and coherent curriculum; clear, prioritized lessons; and purposeful reading and writing, or authentic literacy. Now, in Leading with Focus, he shows administrators, principals, and other education leaders how to apply his model to the work of running schools and districts. In this companion to his previous book, Schmoker offers: An overview of the case for simple, focused school and district leadership-demonstrating its power for vastly improving the work of teachers and leaders. Examples of real schools and districts that have embraced focused leadership-and the incredible results for student learning. A practical, flexible, and easy-to-follow implementation guide for ensuring focused leadership in schools and districts. All students deserve to learn in schools where educators eschew distractions and superfluous activities to concentrate on what's most important. To that end, this book is an essential resource for leaders ready to streamline their practice and focus their efforts on radically improving student learning.

This book presents current and emerging knowledge related to the exceptional situation, the aftermath of COVID-19, which has impacted all aspects of human existence. These chapters relate to current and planned research studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education. The questions answered are related to how the pandemic has changed the practices of education, for better or for worse, and to whether the pandemic has triggered a paradigm shift in the future of education and thus the current practices will become a "new normal." This book gathers both national and international feedback and experiences related to teaching, learning, assessing, conducting research, and policy making in various fields of education during and post COVID-19 pandemic to provide a wholistic view to the different players in the education sector in order to have tangible data that will, hopefully, help in taking the right decisions.