This book presents the findings of a five-year, federally funded study that examined the connection between school restructuring and student achievement. Using a wealth of examples, the authors provide a vivid picture of the conditions under which innovations in a school's organization contribute to achievement. They recommend standards for reaching student intellectual quality and offer evidence of how these standards work.

-Should be read by all who are not satisfied with the status quo in education.-
--Teachers College Record

This book patiently and persuasively asks us to rethink before we redesign' schools, to question many of our deeply ingrained beliefs about learning and schooling, and to move beyond those which no longer meet the test of common sense. It mercifully gives us no ready-to-implement school reform blueprint but rather the necessary design of how to think well about learning and teaching and schooling.
?Theodore R. Sizer, chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools,...

This essential new resource shows how educators can use existing dollars effectively and productively. The key lies in creating finance systems that give schools greater control over their budgets?allowing more resources to flow directly to teachers and students.

Allan Odden and Carolyn Busch look at inefficiencies in current education spAnding, examine varied approaches to school-based financing, and offer recommAndations for restructuring finance systems to meet ambitious reform goals. In addition, they propose ways to make funding more equitable across districts, outline the...

To help both new and seasoned teachers to become more effective with their students from diverse backgrounds, Becoming Multicultural Educators edited by Geneva Gay, offers fourteen compelling stories from different regions, cultures, ethnic groups, and stages of professional and personal growth in developing multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills. One contributing author declares community participation and social activism are the keys to his professional growth. For another, multicultural understanding comes when she learns to unveil the masks of insidious negative...

The founders of our Republic envisioned education as providing for all citizens the necessary apprenticeship in the understanding and practice of democracy. To make democracy safe we must have universal schooling; to make schooling safe for education we must have democracy. But since the founding of our country the study and practice of democracy in our schools has weakened. We must return to the primary purpose of education and ensure that it is indeed for everyone. The Agenda for Education in a Democracy proposed by the authors is more than an effort to simply revitalize a faltering civics...

In Creating Great Schools, Phillip C. Schlechty--one of the nation's best-known experts on leadership and change in schools--offers a hands-on primer that will help arm school leaders with the tools they need to buck the system from within. Creating Great Schools shows educational leaders how they can sustain continuous innovation and improvement in order to create truly great schools. Schlechty outlines the six critical systems that define the norms and expressions of the school's organizational culture3/4recruitment and induction, knowledge transmission, power and authority,...

An examination of the varied and often conflicting proposals for restructuring schools that have been put forth to achieve educational reform. It provides administrators, state policymakers, teachers and other educators with an explanation of what can and cannot be achieved through particular restructuring efforts and of the role they can play as individuals to make such efforts.

Leading experts on teaching and policy research provide concrete illustrations of what teaching for understanding entails.

You Are Thinking of Teaching? is a lovely essay on the consideration of teachin. It asks those who are thinking of teaching to ask questions, to ponder their decision, and to pursue the information they need to make a reasoned choice. There is nothing like it in the professional literature, which makes it all the more valuable.


?Pat Walsey, senior researcher for change, Coalition of Essential Schools