Search results

The decade of the 1980s was unique for the sheer quantity of education reform reports and legislation. Virtually every state enacted education reform legislation, including reforms of teacher education, licensing, and comprehension. According to Darling‐Hammond and Berry, over 1,000 pieces of legislation related to teachers have been drafted since 1980, and “a substantial fraction have been implemented.” As I discussed in my 1989 RSR article, “Five Years after A Nation at Risk: An Annotated Bibliography,” two waves of 1980s reform reports were identified in the enormous body of primary and secondary literature dealing with education reform. The reform publications of the early 1980s stressed improvements in curricular standards, student performance outcomes, and changes to the education programs, such as salary increases, teacher testing, and stricter certification requirements. The second‐wave reform publications emphasized more complex issues centered around the concepts of restructuring the schools and teacher education programs, as well as empowering teachers to become more involved in curriculum and governance issues.

Because teacher training is an important component of high-quality early care and education (ECE), states are employing various efforts to increase the credentials of teachers in private ECE centers. In New Jersey, teachers who serve disadvantaged students in the state’s community-based Abbott preschools are under a court mandate to obtain a Bachelor’s degree and Preschool – Grade 3 certification by September 2004 or lose their jobs. This chapter describes a phenomenological study of five teachers’ experiences in attempting to meet that mandate, and offers implications for policymakers to consider when evaluating the overall success of this reform effort.

Bringing renewed attention to the anemic representation of Black women within the teaching profession, this chapter begins by chronicling the history of Black women in teacher education – from the Reconstruction Era to the 21st century – in an effort to highlight the causes of their conspicuous demographic decline. Next, it is argued that increasing the number of Black women in the teaching profession is a worthwhile endeavor although the rationales for such targeted efforts may not be obvious or appreciated by the casual observer. It is, therefore, important to illuminate the multiple justifications as to why it is essential to improve the underrepresentation of Black women in America’s classrooms. Lastly, it is asserted that serious attention is required to reverse the dramatic exodus of Black women from the teaching profession. In conveying this issue, the author shares special emphasis recruiting tactics, for the national, programmatic, and local school district levels, as promising proposals to enlist and retain more Black women in the teaching profession.

Teacher education reform in the United States has been an ongoing theme over the past 100 years, particularly since A Nation at Risk in the 1980s, when education became increasingly politicized and less of a public good with which the American public did not tinker. These reforms have four different themes: (1) strengthening the clinical component of teacher education, (2) preparing educators with the tools needed for equity and social justice, (3) participating in heightened accountability demands, and (4) expanding alternative certification. This chapter explores these four strands of reform and concludes they are colliding forces in which the country pours time, resources, and energy. Ongoing collisions on the reform landscape produce increasingly negative consequences for teacher education, teacher recruitment, and retention and America's public schools.

The research predicts which public school teachers are likely to resign their union membership since agency fees were found unconstitutional in Janus v. AFSCME. We compare teachers in right-to-work states with comprehensive collective bargaining laws with teachers in former agency shop states, using unique district-teacher matched data constructed from the School and Staffing Survey. We find that teachers who are male, Hispanic, part-time, with alternative certification, work either in charter schools or in schools with more students qualifying for free lunches are more likely to become nonunion. Teachers who are black, work under a collective bargaining, have post-graduate degrees, are more experienced, work in larger schools or in areas with a higher cost of living, perceive more school problems or a poor school climate, work in an elementary school, or teach special education are more likely to remain union members now that agency shop provisions are unenforceable.

Similar to other urban centers, many of the school districts located in California State University Dominguez Hills’s (CSUDH) geographic region struggle to provide their K-12 students with quality teachers. This is particularly true in the areas of Special Education, Math, and Science (California Department of Education, 2012; United States Department of Education, 2013). In CSUDH’s efforts to produce quality teachers, mitigate severe teacher shortages and assist school districts in meeting federal legislative mandates stemming from The No Child Left Behind Act (2001) and The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004), an Alternative Certification Credential Route program based upon precepts of the Professional Development School model was developed, implemented, and funded through a Transition to Teaching (TTT) Federal Grant. These authors hold that this unique TTT SPED program is a viable means of easing SET shortages where they are greatest urban centers. In doing so, these authors suggest a model that other universities striving to meet the needs of K-12 students in urban centers can implement. As such, this program overview seeks to add to the extant teacher preparation and ACR literature, specifically in the context of SPED teacher preparation.

In this chapter, we discuss how an outside writing program was able to assist the stakeholders at a local middle school and the story behind the leaders involved in the process. This program was part of a larger system of “interventions” geared toward improving student success and teacher efficacy. Traditional interventions (after-school tutorials, grouping by state assessment scores, test-taking strategies) were viewed as lacking when it came to their impact on the campus's mostly students of color. Knowing the potential impact of a solid reading and writing program on urban youth, the faculty on the campus teamed with a Writers in the Schools (WITS) writer who proposed several promising practices. The contributions of a professional writer, real-world examples, and ongoing teacher professional development with support contributed to creating a knowledge community of writers that, in addition to creating more scholarship for students and staff, manifested itself in more minority students performing at the highest levels on the state accountability assessments.

Details the last OCLC Users′ Council meeting which had the theme “Cooperation and competition: OCLC and libraries′ strategies for the next generation”. Reports include: the delegate algorithm task force report; OCLC reference services; OCLC cataloging and resource sharing; the Users′ Council executive committee report on telecommunications; access to OCLC services – trends pricing and the future. Concludes with a summary of the question/answer and old business sessions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a protocol for developing students into social actors using young adult (YA) literature in social studies. The world-changing through social action protocol (WSAP) utilizes five recursive steps (P2TripleS): problem posing, problem history, systems thinking, solutions thinking and social action. WSAP is designed to provide secondary social studies teachers with tools to create thematic units, activities and discussions about difficult current issues, such as school violence, bullying, death, or suicide. The purpose of WSAP is to help teachers incorporate strategies to encourage civic action for social justice.

In this paper, WSAP is applied to the YA novel Violent Ends (Hutchinson et al., 2015), which describes a school shooting and its effects from multiple perspectives.

This paper discusses the use of the theoretical framework, WSAP and its five recursive steps (P2TripleS). The protocol developed is a helpful tool for teachers to integrate ELA and Social Studies curriculum in a student-centered, project-based environment while addressing the C3 and Common Core State Standards. The protocol is applied to the YA novel, Violent Ends (Hutchinson et al., 2015) and includes questions and strategies that guide teachers and students to critically think about democratic action and gun violence.

The specific steps of the WSAP protocol will be demonstrated with Violent Ends, providing example activities from this book for practitioners.

This paper is the first to apply the WSAP with a YA text.