Our culture and media often simplify the choice educators face stay in or leave classroom teaching. Written for teachers and other educational professionals, this book dispels this simple dichotomy by representing the range of responses and career pathways that enable educators to make a difference. Based on interviews with hundreds of change-minded educators, the authors share career stories and insights against a backdrop that maps out the complexities, roles, and structures that define professional advancement in education. All of the teachers in this book have taught in challenging urban contexts, fought hard to exercise their professional autonomy and responsibility to serve students well, navigated social networks of educators, friends, and family who buoy or dampen their reform spirit, and remain committed to changing society through schooling. Their stories are as instructive as they are inspiring and offer roadmaps for the current generation of change-minded educators.

Our culture and media often simplify the choice educators face stay in or leave classroom teaching. Written for teachers and other educational professionals, this book dispels this simple dichotomy by representing the range of responses and career pathways that enable educators to make a difference. Based on interviews with hundreds of change-minded educators, the authors share career stories and insights against a backdrop that maps out the complexities, roles, and structures that define professional advancement in education. All of the teachers in this book have taught in challenging urban contexts, fought hard to exercise their professional autonomy and responsibility to serve students well, navigated social networks of educators, friends, and family who buoy or dampen their reform spirit, and remain committed to changing society through schooling. Their stories are as instructive as they are inspiring and offer roadmaps for the current generation of change-minded educators.

"Creating New Educational Communities" brings together fourteen essays on reforming elementary and secondary school education in the United States. The essays focus on measures designed to fully exploit all students' capacity to learn--even those who perform poorly on conventional intelligence tests or in traditional classroom settings.
The contributors feature reports on innovative projects implemented in schools across the United States. Goals of these projects include accommodating different styles of learning among students, encouraging greater participation in educational activities by parents from minority or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and increasing cooperation among teachers, administrators, parents, students, and community members.
The introduction presents an overview of the guiding principles, technical measures, and political concerns critical to the success of educational reform movements and individual chapters include assessments of the impact specific reforms are having on the quality of education, evaluations of their sustainability, and discussions of relevant theory, recent research, and current practices and policies.