How Schools Change: Lessons from Three Communitites - Hardcover

Wagner, Tony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807031089 ISBN 13: 9780807031087

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1994

Synopsis

A behind-the-scenes look at three schools undergoing change, including a white public school undergoing recession, a multi-ethnic public school, and a private school in the process of going coed, offers recommendations to those looking to improve education.

About this title

About the Author

Tony Wagner is an assistant professor of education at the University of New Hampshire.

Reviews

This study of the ninth grade in three Boston-area high schools--two public, one private--presents an objective, behind-the-scenes view of the process of educational change. Much has been written about the need for reform of American pedogogy and one of the more creative, and apparently successful, programs is the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a construct of Brown University educational specialist Theodore Sizer. To the extent that each school integrated CES philosophy--clear academic goals, core values shared by an involved community and collaboration among teachers, students, parents and others--the systemic change is achieving noticeable results in varying degrees. The most promising seems to be the private school for a host of reasons, especially because it is small and autonomous. Wagner's compelling appraisal of dedicated educators at work delivers a strong message. The author is an assistant professor of education at the University of New Hampshire.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In spite of the many pronouncements that America's schools are in decline and danger, heightened by the federal government's 1993 report, A Nation at Risk, little seems to have changed. Yet, instead of further detailing the bad news, Wagner has studied three schools that are involved in systemic reforms in the way they educate children. Through these examples of successful education, Wagner argues for a system with clear academic goals . . . explicitly articulated core values . . . [and] collaboration among several key constituencies. This sounds obvious, but Wagner shows that such ideas are quite radical, because our schools seem to be stuck in a kind of educational entropy in which the very structures that have led to many of our problems are held to all the more dearly as they come under fire. Enlightening, and radical, in the most progressive sense of the word. Brian McCombie

The mythical American high school in Theodore Sizer's Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School (LJ 1/92) has real-life counterparts in the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). Wagner presents a case study of three school communities. One, Brimmer and May, is a CES school in which Wagner's basic principles for change-setting clear academic goals, fostering core values, and facilitating collaboration among students and teachers-are vigorously and successfully pursued. Brimmer and May, though, is an upper-class private school with small classes and fewer bureaucratic burdens than larger public schools. Wagner's arguments for how this experiment can be transferred to large urban public schools are not so convincing. Still, the book functions well as a socioanthropological study of specific educational environments. A good addition to large education collections.
Arla Lindgren, St. John's Univ., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807031089
• ISBN 13: 9780807031087
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304