School Reform: The Critical Issues

by Williamson M. Evers, Lance T. Izumi, Pamela A. Riley

Overview

This book explores a wide range of critical areas in education, examines the basic nature of our education problems, provides a clear understanding of underperformance, and proposes reasonable and effective strategies for success.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817928728
Publisher:	Hoover Institution Press
Publication date:	11/01/2001
Series:	Hoover Insitute Studies , #499
Pages:	438
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lance T. Izumi, J.D. is Koret Senior Fellow and Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI), California’s premier free-market public-policy think tank based in San Francisco and Sacramento. Lance Izumi is a member of the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges, the largest system of higher education in the nation with nearly 3 million students. He served two one-year terms as president of the Board of Governors from 2008 through 2009, and in 2010 he received an award recognizing his leadership and service.

Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, was the US assistant secretary of education for policy from 2007 to 2009. In 2003, Evers served in Iraq as a senior adviser for education to Administrator L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Evers has been a member of National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, a commissioner on the California State Academic Standards Commission, a trustee on the Santa Clara County Board of Education, and a president of the board of directors of the East Palo Alto Charter School.

Table of Contents

•Acknowledgments
•Introduction
•School Reforms Hinder Learning, Crusader Argues
•A Unique School or Out of Step?
•Opposing Approaches So Johnny Can Read: Finding the Answers in Drills and Rigor
•The Schools They Deserve: Howard Gardner and the Remaking of Elite Education
•Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism in Elementary and Secondary Schools
•Should Schools Be Wired to the Internet?: No—Learn First, Surf Later
•The Learning Revolution
•Effective Education Squelched
•The Concept of Grouping in Gifted Education: In Search of Reality—Unraveling the Myths about Tracking, Ability Grouping, and the Gifted
•Ready, Read!
•Failure Outside the Classroom
•Student Customers Being Sold a Bad Product
•Why Johnny Can’t Fail: How the “Floating Standard” Has Destroyed Public Education
•The Parent Trap
•Who Teaches the Teachers?
•Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach
•The Truth About Teacher Salaries and Student Achievement
•Why It’s Too Hard to Fire Bad Teachers
•How Teachers’ Unions Handcuff Schools
•Put Teachers to the Test
•Top-Notch Teachers Are Key to Better Schools
•School Unions Shortchange Students
•A Taboo Erodes
•Loco, Completamente Loco: The Many Failures of “Bilingual Education”
•Defining Disability Down: Why Johnny Can’t Read, Write, or Sit Still
•Why Ritalin Rules
•The Scandal of Special Ed
•Developing and Implementing Academic Standards: A Template for Legislative Reform
•The War Against Testing
•Making America’s Schools Work
•Half of Choice Schools Spend Less than State Allots
•Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiments
•Public Schools: Make Them Private
•Fighting for School Choice: It’s a Civil Right
•Whittling Away the Public School Monopoly
•A Private Solution
•Class Acts: How Charter Schools Are Revamping Public Education in Arizona—and Beyond
•Healthy Competition
•The Elixir of Class Size
•Where Everybody Knows Your Name
•Title I’s $118 Billion Fails to Close Gap
•Special Ed: Factory-like Schooling May Soon Be a Thing of the Past
•“Doing Something” in a Catholic School
•Index
•Permissions