Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation's largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge - launched in 1994 - alongside many other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results.

Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation's largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge - launched in 1994 - alongside many other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results.

Since it was first invented, Americans have been trying to re-design the American high school. One of the latest approaches - funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - is to find inventive high school designs that work well in one location and replicate them in other locations. The authors of this book followed a design team from Big Picture Learning as it worked to do exactly this, recording the challenges it faced, and the strategies it employed. Their accessible and entertaining account of Big Picture's work is laced with stories about 'scaling up' by other school design teams, and in other enterprises beyond high school. Based on careful research, the book is both a practical guide to a new dimension of school reform, and also an interesting read for anyone interested in school change.

This book examines a policy that is one of the most powerful levers to improve teaching quality and advance teaching as a profession. Jennifer Goldstein presents the story of Rosemont, an urban district in California that created ""professional accountability"" with peer assistance and review (PAR), an alternative approach to teacher evaluation in which expert teachers evaluate their teacher peers. It challenges a number of long-held beliefs and practices in education-- adversarial labor relations, ""being nice,"" hierarchy, isolation, and negligence--to achieve very different teacher evaluation outcomes. This timely and accessible volume: Chronicles a rare case of a teacher union and school district partnering to improve teacher quality and teacher evaluation. Presents the most detailed study of PAR implementation, including its processes, challenges, and outcomes. Summarizes the state of PAR implementation across the country in an afterword by Susan Moore Johnson.

Many users of the popular professional development book, The Power of Protocols, discovered that protocols are also very useful for online teaching. This new book, by three of the same authors, focuses on using protocols to enhance learning with their students in multiple environments including online-a growing sector of the educational world. Going Online with Protocols lays out the diverse challenges faced by teachers and by facilitators in the online world and provides readers with strategies to tackle them. The authors provide online adaptations for such traditional protocols as the Tuning Protocol, the Collaborative Assessment Conference, and the Consultancy Protocol. They also offer entirely new protocols unique to online environments. This dynamic resource combines a rich theoretical background with step-by-step illustrations of powerful protocols, along with tips on how and when to use them.

Since it was first invented, Americans have been trying to re-design the American high school. One of the latest approaches - funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - is to find inventive high school designs that work well in one location and replicate them in other locations. The authors of this book followed a design team from Big Picture Learning as it worked to do exactly this, recording the challenges it faced, and the strategies it employed. Their accessible and entertaining account of Big Picture's work is laced with stories about 'scaling up' by other school design teams, and in other enterprises beyond high school. Based on careful research, the book is both a practical guide to a new dimension of school reform, and also an interesting read for anyone interested in school change.

This inspiring book reveals the invisible inner landscapes of how educators teach children from a variety of backgrounds to meet the challenging expectations of today's standards without sacrificing support for their developmental needs or their diverse ways of learning. Featuring 'images of possibility' from an urban school, it describes effective, child-centered teaching in pre-K through fifth grade. Each image is analyzed for the educational decisions that took place to make the experience effective, including the planning involved, the classroom environment and routines that supported it, how standards were addressed, how the teacher assessed student learning to shape instruction, and the impact on students. This practical resource is a must-read for pre- and in-service teachers and anyone committed to helping inner-city children succeed in school and beyond.