The Education Debate

Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line

The Marketing of Higher Education

David L. Kirp

How can you turn an English department into a revenue center? How do you grade students if they are "customers" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today--the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success. With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities "brand" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting. Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market--but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative?

Almost Home - America's Love-Hate Relationship with Community

David L. Kirp

For David Kirp, a gifted storyteller and journalist, the concept of community stretches beyond a cliched figure of speech to describe what happens when people make decisions that reshape one another's lives. He has collected a fascinating variety of such stories from across America to re-create the immediate experience of community--tales that signify in their particulars, giving meaning to the much bandied-about idea of civic virtue. They paint a rich picture of how, for better and for worse, Americans live together. We meet two San Francisco families, one Nicaraguan and the other black, trying to live peacefully with each other; residents in the fire ravaged Berkeley hills, whose greed and architectural ambitions thwart attempts to build the new Eden of their dreams; parents and teachers fighting against long odds to improve the East Harlem public schools; residents of a small southern town caring for a parentless teenager with AIDS; residents of the New Jersey suburb of Mount Laurel deciding whether poor families will be allowed to live in "our town;" and neighbors choosing sides when a black teenager kills his gay white neighbor. While there are real heroes--Ethel Lawrence, the Rosa Parks of the affordable housing movement; and Deborah Meier, tireless advocate for better schools--the stories are mainly about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. These beautifully written tales reveal individuals in the process of forming new alliances or falling back on familiar ones, "bowling alone" or promoting the common good. They show us, past all self-delusion, who we really are.

The College Dropout Scandal

David L. Kirp

Each year, hundreds of thousands of students leave college without a degree, saddled with debt, and little to show for it. In The College Dropout Scandal, David Kirp outlines the scale of the problem and illustrates a range of reforms proven to boost undergraduate learning and raise graduation rates.

Improbable Scholars

The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools

David L. Kirp

No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can't start from scratch, and it can't fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools. The good news, as David L. Kirp reveals in Improbable Scholars, is that there's a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district--once one of the worst in the state--has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data-crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix. The results demand that we take notice--from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner-city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What's even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period. Improbable Scholars offers a playbook--not a prayer book--for reform that will dramatically change our approach to reviving public education.

The Sandbox Investment

The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics

David L. Kirp

Listen to a short interview with David L. KirpHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane The rich have always valued early education, and for the past forty years, millions of poor kids have had Head Start. Now, more and more middle class parents have realized that a good preschool is the smartest investment they can make in their children's future in a competitive world. As The Sandbox Investment shows, their needs are key to the growing call for universal preschool. Writing with the verve of a magazine journalist and the authority of a scholar, David L. Kirp makes the ideal guide to this quiet movement. He crouches in classrooms where committed teachers engage lively four-year-olds, and reveals the findings of an extraordinary longitudinal study that shows the life-changing impact of preschool. He talks with cutting-edge researchers from neuroscience and genetics to economics, whose findings increasingly show how powerfully early childhood shapes the arc of children's lives. Kids-first politics is smart economics: paying for preschool now can help save us from paying for unemployment, crime, and emergency rooms later. As Kirp reports from the inside, activists and political leaders have turned this potent idea into campaigns and policies in red and blue states alike. The Sandbox Investment is the first full story of a campaign that asks Americans to endorse a vision of society that does well by doing good. For anyone who is interested in politics or the social uses of research--for anyone who's interested in the children's futures--it's a compelling read.

Metropolitanization and Public Services

Charles M. Haar, John G. Wofford, David L. Kirp, David K. Cohen, Leonard J. Duhl, Allen V. Haefele

Metropolitanization and Public Services is third in a series on the governance of metropolitan regions which aims to explore the welfare and development of Metropolitan America. Originally published in 1972, this study discusses who decides which essential public services need to be provided within a metropolitan area by looking at political reform as well as presenting ideas on functional efficiency, costs and benefits and the effectiveness of the political process. This title will be of interest to students of environmental studies.

The Education Debate

What Everyone Needs to KnowA

David L. Kirp, Kevin Macpherson

"The Education Debate dissects the essential issues that confront education policymakers and practitioners today. In an era when controversies over the schools' role have become hot-button political issues, disputation is the order of the day, and the book charts a research-driven course through these topics. It starts with the broadest themes about the purposes of education, then narrows the lens, moving from big ideas to classrooms and corridors. The stage is set with an overview of the prek-grade 12 system. Racial and socioeconomic integration, school finance reform and greater student choice-each has been promoted as the royal road to equal opportunity. Policy choices reflect these differences. Which strategy-- community schools, finance equalization, charter schools or vouchers-holds the greatest promise? The education system is intricate and complex. What the roles of the key players, from classroom teachers and administrators to billionaire philanthropists? Life inside the schools presents challenges to teachers and learners alike, never more so than during a time when students have become increasingly diverse. It's essential, in understanding the current climate, to understand how different groups-those with special needs, English language learners, Native American students and LGBT youth-experience the system. COVID has been a stress test for K-12 education, exposing and exacerbating inequities in the system. While the immediate threat of the pandemic has receded, its impact on every aspect of education will persist for decades. No issue stirs the passion more than the way America's youth are educated. From racial reckoning to transgender students, education is a headline-making topic. The Education Debate offers readers a solid starting-point in these pivotal issues"--

Debates in Science Education

Justin Dillon, Mike Watts

This fully revised second edition of Debates in Science Education explores the major issues that science teachers encounter in teaching their subject, encouraging the reader to make their own informed judgements and argue their point of view with deeper theoretical knowledge and understanding. Brand new chapters written by a team of international experts provide fresh insight into topics of central importance when teaching science. Written to aid and inspire beginning teachers, current teachers and established subject leaders, these focused chapters are essential to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of salient issues within school science education, including: STEAM education sustainability and climate change science and sensitive issues equity and diversity science and sex education science and religion science and pedagogy (including science inquiry) transition from primary to secondary school Encouraging critical reflection and aiming to stimulate both novice and experienced teachers, this book is a valuable resource for any student or practicing teacher and particularly those engaged in continuing professional development or Master’s level study.

Common Sense Is a Flower That Does Not Grow in Everyone's Garden

Nebraska State Senator Steve Erdman

I wrote a weekly article to describe legislation, share my opinions on a wide range of subjects, and present them in my common-sense style. This book is a compilation of each weekly article and press release I wrote in the eight years I served in the Nebraska Legislature. The title of the article was "Straight from Steve." This book is a compilation of each and every article I wrote while in the Nebraska Legislature. My hope is that as you read it, you find it thought-provoking and interesting as well! Thank you for reading.

The Parliamentary Debates

Great Britain. Parliament

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Rethinking Teacher Education

David Hopkins, Ken Reid

In recent years there has been a new mood in teacher education. The emphasis is on professional studies, on encouraging trainee teachers to think intelligently about how to tackle problems of the classroom.This book surveys the developments which are taking it further in both Britain and North America. It goes on to argue the case for consolidating the new approach in a thoughtful, structured and comprehensive way. It argues that teacher education should be regarded as a discipline in its own right; that teacher education should be increasingly school focused and problem-centered; that it needs to blend theory more effectively with practice. It argues that teacher training programmes should prepare teachers for an uncertain future in a changing world. This calls for an emphasis on process rather than content in programmes and the preparing of teachers who are self-directed.

The Journal of the National Education Association

National Education Association of the United States

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