A century of education and education reform, along with more than three decades of high-stakes testing and accountability, reveals a disturbing paradox: education has a steadfast commitment to testing and grading. This commitment persists despite ample research, theory, and philosophy revealing the corrosive consequences of both testing and grading in an education system designed to support human agency and democratic principles. This revised edited volume brings together a collection of u...

In Soul Bathing: A Hospital for the Heart, author Joe Bower invites readers into a sacred exploration of love, vulnerability, and the healing power of faith. Drawing from his own reversion to Catholicism and years of spiritual discernment, Bower offers a collection of heartfelt reflections that merge theology with lived experience.Each chapter gently unfolds the mystery of the human heart, its longing for God, its struggle with self-understanding, and its ultimate...

Welcome to Willow Falls, where shadows conceal unimaginable horrors and legends come to life.Thirteen-year-old Joey Speight never expected the bone-chilling events that awaited him in this small river town. Uprooted from Chicago after his father's job loss, Joey’s resentment grows as he's forced to live with a Great-Grandma he barely knows. But the mysteries of Willow Falls soon engulf him, turning his anger into dread.Joey quickly finds solace in new fri...

This is a practical, bold, no-holds barred look at challenges facing educational leaders and the university programs that prepare them through mid-century. It examines key continuities and discontinuities of current times for school, education, and society. Both practice and preparation occur in contested social space, the implications of which are explored in a post industrial, digital age.The stark warning signs of the conflict roiling educational leadership includes the re-segregation a...

In Great Minds In Management Ken G. Smith and Michael A. Hitt have brought together some of the most influential and original thinkers in management. Their contributions to this volume not only outline their landmark contributions to management theory, but also reflect on the process of theory development, presenting their own personal accounts of the gestation of these theories. The result is not only an ambitious and original panorama of the key ideas in management theory presen...

This special e-book collection of articles from Educational Leadership and other ASCD publications examines the kinds of challenges that best prepare students for college, the world of work, and life. The authors examine what excellence and high performance mean in various schools and settings around the world and explore how to make learning richer and more thought-provoking through both rigorous curriculum and formative assessment. They look at some ways that both elementary and...

Although there has been a great deal of rhetoric about learner empowerment in educational and community development circles, this book is the first to offer detailed examples of successful participatory practices in adult education spanning a wide range of program settings, such as schools, institutions, communities, and the workplace. The editors join with practitioner colleagues in the United States and Canada to document successes; to network about ideas from active projects, past and p...

Excellence Through Equity is an inspiring look at how real-world educators are creating schools where all students are able to thrive. In these schools, educators understand that equity is not about treating all children the same. They are deeply committed to ensuring that each student receives what he or she individually needs to develop their full potential and succeed.To help educators with what can at times be a difficult and challenging journey, Blankstein and Noguera...

“Professor Roger Schank has long been one of the world’s most innovative thinkers about education. This book is the culmination of his lifetime of thinking about teaching and learning. Although I’ve known Roger for over 20 years, I’ve learned a lot from this book and I know that you will too.” —Ray Bareiss, Professor and Director of Educational Programs, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley“Finally, some fresh thinkin...

For decades we've been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there's still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they're doing is actually working. But what does that mean in practice?High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation's...

Over the last decade the transformation in the field of education that is occurring under the twin banners of "standards" and "accountability" has materially affected every aspect of schooling, teaching, and teacher education in the United States. Teaching By Numbers, offers interdisciplinary ways to understand the educational reforms underway in urban education, teaching, and teacher education, and their impact on what it means to teach. Peter Taubman maps the totality of the tra...

Guidance for ever-changing challenges, success through improved effectivenessEquip yourself to face the demands of a superintendent with this practical guide for new and veteran school leaders. Understanding leadership and budgets is only one piece of a pie that has grown to include privatization, performance-based teacher compensation, technology, and global comparisons like PISA.Based on 15 years of research with 300 superintendents, including me...