Abstract/Notes: Reviewed in Communications 2008/1 // In her dissertation she analyses the efforts of New Education in her home country and compares them to European reform approaches. In this context she analyses and evaluates a large amount of written documents and adds to her literary research especially for the ten alternative schools her own studies at these schools and interviews with the educationalists/teachers responsible. One of the analysed schools was a Montessori school, another one was a Waldorf school. The survey communicates interesting insights and findings about school development in an increasingly democratising Asian country that is scarcely considered in Germany.

Language: English

Published: Münster, Germany, 2005

Abstract/Notes: In May, 1991, the newly chosen Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent, Dr. Ho,vard Fuller, visited Highland Community School. His main question to parents and staff assembled to greet him was, "What lessons can we public school people learn from you?" Highland people had cogent ideas to pass on to him. This book is a more formal response in which I hope the hundreds of people who have continuously created Highland in its first twenty-five years speak through me in answer to him and to his colleagues elsewhere in public education. Highland began in late 1968, and by 1994 was one of only ten schools in the entire country to qualify for state-financed vouchers to independent urban schools. It is small: about seventy ethnically and economically diverse students aged two-and-a-half to ten years, three teachers and three assistants, a full-time executive director, and three part-time helpers, including a parent coordinator. One of the teachers doubles as principal. Annual expenditures per pupil are about $2,800. The curriculum is Montessori-based. The building is a century-old mansion. The school is governed by a nine-member parent board of directors and helped, primarily in fund-raising, by an advisory group of trustees. It is located in Milwaukee's Near West Side, an economically depressed and violent neighborhood (Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, since razed, was only five blocks from the school). This is the story of a small school. Faced with the vastness of urban decay and its impact on educational institutions, the reader might question whether describing and analyzing this diminutive organization has any relevance to urban education. Despite differences between it and stereotypical urban public schools, however, it brings a message to American education much more important than its size seems to warrant. Its size is precisely the point. Change nucleates and incubates in small settings. Our huge society conditions us to think in terms of large numbers, sweeping change, vast federal programs. Government may be able to create contexts for change, but the changes themselves have to be brought about where individuals assemble to meet their mutual needs. Whether their relationships will be harmonious and productive, or acrimonious and dysfunctional, depends on how the organization is structured and what spirit has been breathed into it. This book fleshes out the organizational and attitudinal reasons that Highland works so well and what public education can learn from this small inner-city educational oasis. As a framework for the organization of this study, let us first review factors that research has revealed make a school effective.

Language: English

Published: New York, New York: Garland, 1997

Edition: 1st

ISBN: 978-1-315-05106-2

Series: Studies in Education and Culture , 10

Language: English

Language: English

ISSN: 0010-700X

Language: Italian

ISSN: 0042-7241

Language: English

Language: English

ISSN: 1071-6246

Language: English

Published: Warwick, England, 2001

Language: English

ISSN: 1071-6246

Language: English

ISSN: 1071-6246