Observers of all political persuasions agree that our urban schools are in a state of crisis. Yet most efforts at school reform treat schools as isolated institutions, disconnected from the communities in which they are embedded and insulated from the political realities which surround them.

Community Organizing for Urban School Reform tells the story of a radically different approach to educational change. Using a case study approach, Dennis Shirley describes how working-class parents, public school teachers, clergy, social workers, business partners, and a host of...

Can public schools still educate America's children, particularly in poor and working class communities? Many advocates of school reform have called for dismantling public education in favor of market-based models of reform such as privatization and vouchers. By contrast, this pathfinding book explores how community organizing and activism in support of public schools in one of America's most economically disadvantaged regions, the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, has engendered impressive academic results.

Dennis Shirley focuses the book around case studies of three schools that...

In March 1933, Nazi storm troopers seized control of the Odenwaldschule, a small German boarding school near Heidelberg. Founded in 1910 by educational reformer Paul Geheeb, the Odenwaldschule was a crown jewel of the progressive education movement, renowned for its emancipatory pedagogical innovations and sweeping curricular reforms. In the tumultuous year that followed that fateful spring, Geheeb moved from an initial effort to accommodate Nazi reforms to an active opposition to the Third Reich's transformation of the school. Convinced at last that humanistic education was all but...

The New Imperatives of Educational Change is a clarion call to move beyond the standardized testing and marketplace competition that have become pervasive in school systems to focus instead on creating the conditions that will encourage all students to become critical and independent thinkers. Dennis Shirley presents five new imperatives to guide educators and policymakers towards a re-thinking of what it means to teach effectively and to learn in depth. The evidentiary imperative requires educators to attain a better grasp of what data actually reveal about...

The New Imperatives of Educational Change is a clarion call to move beyond the standardized testing and marketplace competition that have become pervasive in school systems to focus instead on creating the conditions that will encourage all students to become critical and independent thinkers. Dennis Shirley presents five new imperatives to guide educators and policymakers towards a re-thinking of what it means to teach effectively and to learn in depth. The evidentiary imperative requires educators to attain a better grasp of what data actually reveal about...