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.

A Brookings Institution Press with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress publication America's fragmented, decentralized, politicized, and bureaucratic system of education governance is a major impediment to school reform. In this important new book, a number of leading education scholars, analysts, and practitioners show that understanding the impact of specific policy changes in areas such as standards, testing, teachers, or school choice requires careful analysis of the broader governing arrangements that influence their content, implementation, and impact. Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century comprehensively assesses the strengths and weaknesses of what remains of the old in education governance, scrutinizes how traditional governance forms are changing, and suggests how governing arrangements might be further altered to produce better educational outcomes for children. Paul Manna, Patrick McGuinn, and their colleagues provide the analysis and alternatives that will inform attempts to adapt nineteenth and twentieth century governance structures to the new demands and opportunities of today. Contents: Education Governance in America: Who Leads When Everyone Is in Charge?, Patrick McGuinn and Paul Manna The Failures of U.S. Education Governance Today, Chester E. Finn Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli How Current Education Governance Distorts Financial Decisionmaking, Marguerite Roza Governance Challenges to Innovators within the System, Michelle R. Davis Governance Challenges to Innovators outside the System, Steven F. Wilson Rethinking District Governance, Frederick M. Hess and Olivia M. Meeks Interstate Governance of Standards and Testing, Kathryn A. McDermott Education Governance in Performance-Based Federalism, Kenneth K. Wong The Rise of Education Executives in the White House, State House, and Mayor’s Office, Jeffrey R. Henig English Perspectives on Education Governance and Delivery, Michael Barber Education Governance in Canada and the United States, Sandra Vergari Education Governance in Comparative Perspective, Michael Mintrom and Richard Walley Governance Lessons from the Health Care and Environment Sectors, Barry G. Rabe Toward a Coherent and Fair Funding System, Cynthia G. Brown Picturing a Different Governance Structure for Public Education, Paul T. Hill From Theory to Results in Governance Reform, Kenneth J. Meier The Tall Task of Education Governance Reform, Paul Manna and Patrick McGuinn

"Educational leaders are empowered by a 7-steps framework to move their schools and districts forward in a quest to create community consensus and build the professional capacity for preparing students for 21st century learning."--Book cover.

This book describes how different nations have defined the core competencies and skills that young people will need in order to thrive in the twenty-first-century, and how those nations have fashioned educational policies and curricula meant to promote those skills. The book examines six countries—Chile, China, India, Mexico, Singapore, and the United States—exploring how each one defines, supports, and cultivates those competencies that students will need in order to succeed in the current century. Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century appears at a time of heightened attention to comparative studies of national education systems, and to international student assessments such as those that have come out of PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment), led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This book’s crucial contribution to the burgeoning field of international education arises out of its special attention to first principles—and thus to first questions: As Reimers and Chung explain, “much can be gained by an explicit investigation of the intended purposes of education, in what they attempt to teach students, and in the related questions of why those purposes and how they are achieved.” These questions are crucial to education practice and reform at a time when educators (and the students they serve) face unique, pressing challenges. The book’s detailed attention to such questions signals its indispensable value for policy makers, scholars, and education leaders today.

The U.S. system of graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has served the nation and its science and engineering enterprise extremely well. Over the course of their education, graduate students become involved in advancing the frontiers of discovery, as well as in making significant contributions to the growth of the U.S. economy, its national security, and the health and well-being of its people. However, continuous, dramatic innovations in research methods and technologies, changes in the nature and availability of work, shifts in demographics, and expansions in the scope of occupations needing STEM expertise raise questions about how well the current STEM graduate education system is meeting the full array of 21st century needs. Indeed, recent surveys of employers and graduates and studies of graduate education suggest that many graduate programs do not adequately prepare students to translate their knowledge into impact in multiple careers. Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century examines the current state of U.S. graduate STEM education. This report explores how the system might best respond to ongoing developments in the conduct of research on evidence-based teaching practices and in the needs and interests of its students and the broader society it seeks to serve. This will be an essential resource for the primary stakeholders in the U.S. STEM enterprise, including federal and state policymakers, public and private funders, institutions of higher education, their administrators and faculty, leaders in business and industry, and the students the system is intended to educate.

Guidance in effective school board function.

One of the major domestic policy issues of our time is whether our nation can provide a more effective educational experience for our children. Economists have stressed that the quality of our educational system eventually defines the ability of our workforce, which in turn affects our competitive position in the world market. This issue has earned increasing attention in light of recent reports that students in many nations perform at higher levels of educational competence than children in America's schools. Inspiring Greatness in Education describes the 21st Century Schools program (21C), a whole-school reform model developed by Edward Zigler over 20 years ago and since then has been in a constant state of testing, implementation, and scaling up. The goal of 21C is to promote optimal child development, which should become manifest in sound educational performance. In practice, 21C provides preschool education as well as good-quality child care before and during the school years, in combination with a number of other family supports. This book will provide an in-depth case study examination of the experience of the Independence School District in Independence, Missouri. The Independence School District embraced School of the 21st Century concepts in 1988, becoming the first urban school district in the nation to do so. This book reveals and documents Independence School District's success as a national model for 21C programming, as well as the experiences, testimonials and opinions of parents, students, teachers, administrators and community officials. By focusing on the impetus and history of the 21C concept, its organic evolution and its applications at the Independence School District, this book is designed to inform, educate, and inspire all who read it and to serve as a model for other school districts that want to achieve similar successes.