Education: Higher Education Transformed, Positive Strategies in Behavioral Intervention, & Charter Schools - Hope or Hype

American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005: Documenting the National Discourse (BOOK): edited by Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender

This long-awaited sequel to Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith's classic anthology American Higher Education: A Documentary History presents one hundred and seventy-two key edited documents that record the transformation of higher education over the past sixty years.

The volume includes such seminal documents as Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Science, the Endless Frontier; the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and Sweezy v. New Hampshire; and Adrienne Rich's challenging essay "Taking Women Students Seriously." The wide variety of readings underscores responses of higher education to a memorable, often tumultuous, half century. Colleges and universities faced a transformation of their educational goals, institutional structures and curricula, and admission policies; the ethnic and economic composition of student bodies; an expanding social and gender membership in the professoriate; their growing allegiance to and dependence on federal and foundation financial aids; and even the definitions and defenses of academic freedom.

Behavioral Interventions in Schools: Evidence-Based Positive Strategies (BOOK): edited by Angeleque Akin-Little

This book provides school psychologists, counselors, social workers, school administrators, and teachers with a summary of ecologically sound primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies. The contributors cover fundamentals such as how to conduct a behavioral assessment, how to measure treatment integrity and response to intervention, and how to promote generalization and maintenance of learned positive behaviors. They also discuss prevention measures such as positive behavior support and group contingencies that schools can implement system-wide. Several chapters describe more narrowly focused interventions such as daily report cards and self modeling, while the final section explains how to customize behavioral strategies for special populations such as preschoolers; children with autism, internalizing, or externalizing disorders; and those who have experienced trauma.

Charter Schools: Hope or Hype? (BOOK): by Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider

Schools, prisons, hospitals, governments, and the like should not be run as businesses or following business principles. The reason is simple, most businesses fail. Business methodology more often than not leads to failure. Society should, instead prefer and follow the methods of science, engineering, and democracy.

Charter Schools in Eight States: Effects on Achievement, Attainment, Integration, and Competition (BOOK): by Ron Zimmer

Charter schools now exist in 40 states, but the best charter-school studies to date have focused on individual states. This book examines charter schools in eight states with varied policy contexts. It assesses the characteristics of charter schools' students, their effectiveness in raising student achievement and promoting graduation and college entry, and their competitive effects on student achievement in traditional public schools.

Closed minds?: Politics and Ideology in American Universities (BOOK): by Bruce L.R. Smith, Jeremy D. Mayer, A. Lee Fritschler

Contrary to popular belief, the problem with U.S. higher education is not too much politics but too little. Far from being bastions of liberal bias, American universities have largely withdrawn from the world of politics. So conclude Bruce L. R. Smith, Jeremy Mayer, and Lee Fritschler in this illuminating book.

Congress and the Classroom: From the Cold War to "No Child Left Behind" (BOOK): by Lee W. Anderson

Covering in depth 50 years of American education history, Anderson's scholarly work considers Congress's role in federal government education policies, drawing principally from congressional records but rendering them in surprisingly accessible prose. Following congress from its initial reluctance to involve itself in state educational affairs to its current bipartisan belief in federal education investment, Anderson traces the debate from the Ordinance of 1785 to the landmark National Defense Act of 1958 to the "large-scale compromise" of the No Child Left Behind act, which balances "federal support and high-stakes accountability."

Anderson has an eye for the telling quote, such as then-President Ford's prescient remark that the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 "will remain in effect even though the Congress appropriates far less than the amounts contemplated," cutting to the quick of a persistent problem in all American educational legislation: woeful underfunding. By keeping his analysis to a relatively small segment of the debate that touches so many, and by focusing on the last five decades of enacted legislation, Anderson has crafted a worthwhile and clarifying look at the changing face of federal educational funding.

Negotiating Literacy Learning: Exploring the Challenges and Achievements of Struggling Readers (BOOK): Edited by Janine K. Bixler

Teaching professionals encounter students at varying levels of literacy proficiency and achievement. Negotiating Literacy Learning brilliantly illustrates eight real-life examples of children who struggle with reading, outlining the steps eight master teachers take to diagnose and remediate those problems. The cases shared in this text identify reading difficulties that teachers typically encounter in their classrooms, walking readers through each teacher's method for negotiating learning. Cases are organized in a clear and succinct manner, beginning with assessments followed by an instructional decision-making process to demonstrate a methodology you can follow to ensure that your students reach their literacy potential. This book is for all professionals who believe that teaching requires a commitment to learning from and listening to students in order to improve teaching responses.