Much has been written, debated, and learned about whether the intent of charter schools and their relationship to traditional public schools has been realized. The goal has always been to make things better for all children and to offer parents a quality choice. In the City of Newark both the quantity and quality of offerings made available to families over the past twenty years have brought progress and promise. This book through the voice of various stakeholders is a chronicle of what has taken place in the City of Newark, New Jersey.

As serialized in the New Yorker, a roiling, behind-the-scenes look at the high-pressure race to turn around Newark's failing schools, with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Governor Chris Christie, and Senator Cory Booker in eyebrow-raising leading roles

From David Osborne, the author of Reinventing Government--a biting analysis of the failure of America's public schools and a comprehensive plan for revitalizing American education. In Reinventing America's Schools, David Osborne, one of the world's foremost experts on public sector reform, offers a comprehensive analysis of the charter school movements and presents a theory that will do for American schools what his New York Times bestseller Reinventing Government did for public governance in 1992. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city got an unexpected opportunity to recreate their school system from scratch. The state's Recovery School District (RSD), created to turn around failing schools, gradually transformed all of its New Orleans schools into charter schools, and the results are shaking the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, ACT scores, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: the city's RSD schools have tripled their effectiveness in eight years. Now other cities are following suit, with state governments reinventing failing schools in Newark, Camden, Memphis, Denver, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Oakland. In this book, Osborne uses compelling stories from cities like New Orleans and lays out the history and possible future of public education. Ultimately, he uses his extensive research to argue that in today's world, we should treat every public school like a charter school and grant them autonomy, accountability, diversity of school designs, and parental choice.

BLACK ENTERPRISE is the ultimate source for wealth creation for African American professionals, entrepreneurs and corporate executives. Every month, BLACK ENTERPRISE delivers timely, useful information on careers, small business and personal finance.

In this disturbing but ultimately hopeful personal account, Jean Anyon provides compelling evidence that the economic and political devastation of America's inner cities has robbed schools and teachers of the capacity to successfully implement current strategies of educational reform. She argues that without fundamental change in government and business policies and the redirection of major resources back into the schools and the communities they serve, urban schools are consigned to failure, and no effort at raising standards, improving teaching, or boosting achievement can occur. Based on her participation in an intensive four-year school reform project in the Newark, New Jersey public schools, the author vividly captures the anguish and anger of students and teachers caught in the tangle of a failing school system. Ghetto Schooling offers a penetrating historical analysis of more than a century of government and business policies that have drained the economic, political, and human resources of urban populations. Provocative and controversial, this book reveals the historical roots of the current crisis in ghetto schools and what must be done to reverse the downward spiral.

For more than two decades, the concept of student engagement has grown from simple attention in class to a construct comprised of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that embody and further develop motivation for learning. Similarly, the goals of student engagement have evolved from dropout prevention to improved outcomes for lifelong learning. This robust expansion has led to numerous lines of research across disciplines and are brought together clearly and comprehensively in the Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. The Handbook guides readers through the field’s rich history, sorts out its component constructs, and identifies knowledge gaps to be filled by future research. Grounding data in real-world learning situations, contributors analyze indicators and facilitators of student engagement, link engagement to motivation, and gauge the impact of family, peers, and teachers on engagement in elementary and secondary grades. Findings on the effectiveness of classroom interventions are discussed in detail. And because assessing engagement is still a relatively new endeavor, chapters on measurement methods and issues round out this important resource. Topical areas addressed in the Handbook include: Engagement across developmental stages. Self-efficacy in the engaged learner. Parental and social influences on engagement and achievement motivation. The engaging nature of teaching for competency development. The relationship between engagement and high-risk behavior in adolescents. Comparing methods for measuring student engagement. An essential guide to the expanding knowledge base, the Handbook of Research on Student Engagement serves as a valuable resource for researchers, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students in such varied fields as clinical child and school psychology, educational psychology, public health, teaching and teacher education, social work, and educational policy.