Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools

Description

Deficient urban schooling remains one of America's most pressing—and stubborn—public policy problems. This important new book details and evaluates a radical and promising new approach to K-12 education reform. Strife and Progress explains for a broad audience the "portfolio strategy" for providing urban education—its rationale, implementation, and results. Under the portfolio strategy, cities use anything that works, indifferent to whether schools are run by the public district or private entities. It combines traditional modes of schooling with newer methods, including chartering and experimentation with schools making innovative use of people and technology. Urban districts try to make themselves magnets for new talent, recruiting educators and career switchers looking to make a difference for poor children. The portfolio strategy creates interesting new bedfellows: people who think that government should oversee public education align with those advocating choice, competition, and entrepreneurship. It cuts across political lines and engages city governments and civic assets (e.g., philanthropies, businesses, universities) much more deeply than earlier reform initiatives. New York and New Orleans were portfolio pioneers, but the idea has spread rapidly to cities as far-flung as Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago. Results have been mixed overall but generally positive in places that implemented the strategy most aggressively. Reform leaders such as New York's Joel Klein have been overly optimistic, however, assuming that the strategy's merits would be so obvious that careful assessment would be unnecessary. Serious policy evaluation is still needed.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Similar books

• 

  Strife

  By John Galsworthy

  John Galsworthy (1867-1933), novelist and dramatist, is most widely known as the author of The Forsyte Saga, but recent productions testify to the power that his plays still exert over modern audiences and the strength and relevance of the ...

• 

  Third enlarged catalogue of the Solomon R. Guggeneheim collection of non-objective paintings

  By Hilla Rebay

  ... strife for progress. Most painters want to make their living through artistic work which they like best; they expect to sell whether they are masters or not; they hope to improve by letting others pay for their progress; yet the public ...

• 

  A Discourse on the Object and Progress of Investigation, Into the Oriental Literature and Science

  By James Bird

  This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it...

• 

  Environment, Growth and Development: The Concepts and Strategies of Sustainability

  By Peter Bartelmus

  ... strife for growth and development, it is useful to recall what is commonly understood by economic growth and development. Development is generally accepted to be a process that improves the living conditions of people. Most also agree ...

• 

  Hugo's Works

  By Victor Hugo

  Victor Hugo. Hugo's Works: This History of a Crime (Part 2) and Napoleon the Little THE WORKS OF VICTOR HUGO IN TWENTY VOLUMES LIMITED TO. Front Cover.