Prioritizing Urban Children, Teachers, and Schools through Professional Development Schools
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Provides insights into university partnerships with urban schools.
Description
How can we better educate disadvantaged urban students? Drawing on over five years' experience in a broad partnership involving twelve urban professional development schools in five districts, a teachers' union, a comprehensive public university, and several community-based organizations, the contributors to this volume describe how they worked together to help disadvantaged urban students through an innovative professional development program. By networking with educators at different levels and coordinating curriculum projects, they were able to begin overcoming rigid and ineffective mandates and curricula tied to standardized test scores and get through to their students on more meaningful and productive levels. The contributors share their successes and failures with these efforts, as well as insights related to the ethical, political, and academic challenges faced by professional development schools.
Pia Lindquist Wong is Associate Dean of the College of Education at California State University Sacramento and coauthor (with Maria del Pilar O'Cádiz and Carlos Alberto Torres) of Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo. Ronald David Glass is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Reviews
"This comprehensive and thought-provoking collection of essays paints a robust and realistic portrait of what progressive school reform can look like in a variety of urban settings, as well as the types of change that it can bring about … This compilation contributes uniquely to the field of the history of education … [it] offers readers a solid collection of insightful essays that shine light on the way forward while exposing the realities of urban public education. " — H-Net Reviews (H-Education)
"A key benefit of this work is that it approaches the issues from the perspectives of all of those involved in reform movements: administrators, teachers, candidates, students, and the general public. The editors provide a balanced text that confronts the very real difficulties and rewards of urban education reform. " — CHOICE
"…an important contribution to the literature on how to build partnerships in urban (and other) settings that disrupt, challenge, and transform oppressive social structures. " — Teacher's College Record