On these pages is a call to action for teachers who have been shackled by the self-serving motives of agenda driven politicians. Here we present a new innovative process designed to prepare children to be productive members of their community. Students are empowered to take charge of their educational lives where thinking is valued above obedience, and their parents are respected as full partners in the process. The greatest challenge to educators in this decade is to prepare children to rise above the confirmation bias and embrace critical thinking. In this day of continuous propaganda from many directions, everything requires in depth thinking, research and processing. Change won't come from the top! The time has come to go underground to subvert the system from the bottom up. We infuse creative ideas while providing a pattern for systemic change that empowers teachers allowing them to take back their profession. Teachers are the saviors who are in the position to expand children's minds to the stars and beyond, giving them hope that they will make the world a better place. It is time to take a risk for children by subverting the system with the goal of true, whole child education.

The late Theodore Sizer's vision for a truly democratic public high school system

Our current high schools are ill-designed and inefficient. We have inherited a program of studies that in its overall structure has not changed in over a century. The question is "What's next?" Theodore Sizer, the founder of The Coalition of Essential Schools, was a passionate advocate for the American school system. In this, his last book, he offers a vision of what a future secondary education might look like. In a book that tells the story of his own odyssey, Sizer gives shape to a much-needed agenda for improving our high schools.Includes a vision for the future of our High Schools from one of America's greatest leaders of educational reformWritten by Theodore Sizer founder of The Coalition of Essential Schools and author of landmark book "Horace's Compromise "

This final book from the late Theodore Sizer reveals the man and his vision for our secondary education system.

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust.
Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want.
In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment.
Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.