What constitutes better schooling for today's youth? In 1984 educational theorist Theodore R. Sizer formulated nine Common Principles to answer this question and launched The Coalition of Essential Schools, an organization of schools attempting to change their own structure, curriculum, pedagogy, and power relations according to Sizer's Principles. This important book, the first comprehensive look at Coalition schools, charts the course of reform at eight charter member schools. Donna E. Muncey and Patrick J. McQuillan, experts in anthropology as well as education, conducted a five-year ethnographic study to understand what happened in Coalition schools. The authors looked at curricular and pedagogical developments; how changes affected individual students, teachers, administrators, and other school personnel; and how American cultural beliefs influenced efforts to change.

What constitutes better schooling for today's youth? In 1984 educational theorist Theodore R. Sizer formulated nine Common Principles to answer this question and launched The Coalition of Essential Schools, an organization of schools attempting to change their own structure, curriculum, pedagogy, and power relations according to Sizer's Principles. This important book, the first comprehensive look at Coalition schools, charts the course of reform at eight charter member schools. Donna E. Muncey and Patrick J. McQuillan, experts in anthropology as well as education, conducted a five-year ethnographic study to understand what happened in Coalition schools. The authors looked at curricular and pedagogical developments; how changes affected individual students, teachers, administrators, and other school personnel; and how American cultural beliefs influenced efforts to change.

This book offers the first detailed study of the essential relationship between thought reform and the "dangerous classes"--The prostitutes, beggars, petty criminals, and other "lumpenproletarians" the Communists saw as a threat to society and the revolution. Aminda Smith takes readers inside early-PRC reformatories, where the new state endeavored to transform "vagrants" into members of the laboring masses. As places where "the people" were literally created, these centers became testing grounds for rapidly changing ideas and experiments about thought reform and the subjects they produced. Smit.

The Grammar of School Discipline examines how seemingly discrete school discipline policies and practices constitute a particular grammar: Removal, Resistance and Reform. Weaving numeric data with portraits of students and school practitioners, the authors detail a nuanced landscape of school discipline in Alabama and its anti-Black foundations. The removal of Black students can be traced to the antebellum construction of Blackness as criminal, deviant, and deserving of punishment. A focus on resistance centers the agency that students and practitioners exercise despite anti-Black removal. An exploration of specific reform efforts emphasizes that even the most well-intentioned and well-organized reforms are limited when the removal of students remains an option for practitioners. The authors end with an appeal to educational stakeholders to repair the harms that these anti-Black policies and practices inflict on students and communities, and thus move towards repairing the damage that white supremacy inflicts on everyone’s humanity.

The Sharp Edge of Educational Change conveys the realities of reform as they affect educators' practice. The collected chapters each focus on particular current reform and reveal the technical and logistical complications, social and political dynamics, cognitive disjunctures and limitations, and emotional demands of reform. In so doing, they provide new and rich conceptual perspectives on the contemporary nature of teachers' and administrators' work in classrooms, schools and other educational settings.

The only handbook of its kind to bring together materials from a wide range of authoritative works, providing the reader with a comprehensive overview of reform in American education. Crafted in ten skillfully written chapters, Educational Reform covers the history, politics, and processes of educational reform and addresses reforms in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Starting with a definition of educational reform and where its far-reaching results can lead, the work goes on to assess the role of the public in educational reform, the educational reform industry, and resistance to reform. Of interest to school boards and administrators and useful in graduate and undergraduate courses in education, it is written in a conversational tone that brings the subject out of the realm of dry analysis. Readers will benefit not only from the numerous case studies that intersperse the themes discussed, but also from the extensive bibliography of print and nonprint resources (including websites) listed for further study. There is little doubt that the classroom must change to meet the needs of the 21st century—read Educational Reform to learn just how.

In this insightful look at school reform, Robert Evans examines the real-life hurdles to implementing innovation and explains how the best-intended efforts can be stalled by educators who too often feel burdened and conflicted by the change process. He provides a new model of leadership along with practical management strategies for building a framework of cooperation between leaders of change and the people they depend upon to implement it.