This practical, informative book shows parents and professionals alike how they can work with schools to help children receive the best possible education. Throughout, Oakes and Lipton provide invaluable guidance on such topics as how children learn; how changes at home can increase a child's success at school; how basic subjects might be taught in more meaningful ways; how children with physical, emotional, social, or learning problems can be mainstreamed successfully; and what reforms are necessary to give all children the schools they need.
"A true handbook. . . . This book will give...

At a time when lowering the dropout rate is said to be a national priority, America's longest running and largest dropout prevention program has gone strangely unnoticed. This highly readable book explores the hidden world of the continuation high school, the most common form of alternative high school. Deirdre M. Kelly analyzes the factors that limit its success and focuses especially on gender issues in these schools: how girls and boys slip in and out of the system in different ways, for different reasons, and with different consequences.
Kelly finds that mainstream high schools...

-A convincing portrait of teachers actively engaged in educational reform...offering a hopeful yet realistic vision of revitalized democracy inspired by a passion for the public good. This book is an eloquent defense of civic virtue.-
--Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities

-Rich, realistic, invigorating, and scary. Any middle school educator who has been part of an effort to reform the educational process will see himself or herself in this book--as the brave risk taker, the naive visionary, the frightened frontline trooper, and the...

Playing Favorites examines the ways in which gifted education disrupts the classroom community, deskills regular classroom teachers, limits their ability and willingness to meet individual needs, and impairs the creation of a climate of inclusion and acceptance of difference. Sapon-Shevin shows here that current models of gifted education are elitist and meritocratic, treating some children, not just differently than others, but better; and that in large urban districts, gifted education programs are often racist as well. By creating and funding gifted programs, the author contends, schools...

Major "paradigm shifts"-replacing one "world view" with another regarding what constitutes appropriate knowledge do not happen over night. Centuries usually intervene in the process. Even minor shifts admitting alternative world views into the domain of legitimate knowledge producing theory and practice-require decades of controversy, especially, it seems to us, in the field of education. It has only been in the last 20 years or so that the educational research community has begun to accept the "scientific" credibility of the qualitative approaches to inquiry such as participant observation,...