Educational Leadership articles from September 1994

Educational Leadership archives from September 1994

On schools where students want to be: a conversation with Deborah Meier. (co-principal of Central Park East School in New York, New York) (includes related article) (Interview)
September 1, 1994... Creating smaller schools, granting parents choice in schools, and, especially, starting a conversation about what it means to be an educated person--these are Deborah Meier's suggestions for those who want to craft a better alternative to...

A GEM of a choice. (Gardendale Elementary Magnet School)
September 1, 1994... At a four-theme magnet school in Florida, an innovative design has enriched learning for students and won the enthusiastic commitment of teachers and parents. Just eight miles from the Kennedy Space Center, where rocket and shuttle launches...

Launching Paideia in Chattanooga. (school model aimed at reforming public schools)
September 1, 1994... In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the ancient Socratic method of teaching gives urban students opportunities to learn all subjects. A crisis of confidence in public education has observers wondering whether public schools are preparing all students...

How the Gateway Program helps troubled teens.
September 1, 1994... Georgia educators find unruly teens responsive to a nonpunitive, therapeutic alternative to out-of-school suspension. Bruce was a 15-year-old middle school student in trouble again.(1) His background included family problems, a history of...

The Global Youth Academy.
September 1, 1994... In Zimbabwe, 32 American teenagers on a worldwide learning and service tour cleaned the Harare bus depot. The crowd laughed at the foreigners, but then, on by one, they joined the students and stayed for talks about cultural difference in the...

ALPHA: a survivor. (Alternative Learning Program for the High School Age)
September 1, 1994... Some of us are old enough to remember that era of youthful idealism, drugs, roc and roll, and disdain for authority, when young people made common cause agains the police, the military, the schools, and those of us over 30. Sit-ins and...

Alternative schools: the state of the art.
September 1, 1994... Today's alternative schools seem a far cry from those of the '60s, when the genre first surfaced in public education. Yet, the early alternatives, like today's, represented innovation; small-scale, informal ambiance; and departure from...

Teaching with love at Oasis High. (Mount Pleasant, Michigan)
September 1, 1994... Teachers at a small, effective school have learned how to help troubled, high-risk students. Students who enter Oasis High School have had difficulties in traditional schools and are at high risk of future unemployment or incarceration. Of...

The promise of charter schools. (includes related article)
September 1, 1994... Charter schools offer a radically different approach to providing and managing public education, but not necessarily a smooth road. Charter schools are not for the faint of heart. Their creation, governance, and day-to-day operation require a...

A progress report on California's charter schools.
September 1, 1994... Innovative staffing procedures, new uses of technology, teaming, and community involvement are some of the stand-out features in the California charter school movement. In 1992, when the California legislature approved the establishment of...

How to plan a charter school.
September 1, 1994... Lessons from the Community Involved Charter School, a grassroots effort in Jefferson County, Colorado, are instructive for others with an alternative school vision. In January 1991, Arnie Langberg and I visited Jefferson County Open School...

Why parents choose home schooling.
September 1, 1994... Home schooling neither isolates children not harms their academic growth; it does, however, come close to the true definition of education: the passing down of culture. So, where do your children go to school?" Of all the casual questions...

Perspectives from a home-schooling educator.
September 1, 1994... Parents who decide to school their children at home can find a way to make it work and, in doing so, can bring their families closer together. The home-schooling movement has made strange bedfellows of religious conservatives and political...

Home schoolers as public school tutors.
September 1, 1994... Home-schooling advocates and public schools don't have to be at complete odds. At a Texas elementary school, both sides have found a common meeting ground, with children reaping the benefits. When I approached Principal Don Smith with my idea...

A home school/school district partnership.
September 1, 1994... In Ames, Iowa, home schoolers and the public school system are joining together in a team effort to help children reach their educational goals. Thirty-three students from kindergarten to 4th grade wait outside the door of the school...

The Edison Project's plan to redefine public education.
September 1, 1994... The Edison Project believes that the creative, entrepreneurial forces so vital in other areas of our society can breathe new life into public education. Two years ago a group of educators, writers, technology experts, and businesspeople came...

Education for profit: a yellow brick road to nowhere. (includes related article)
September 1, 1994... For some observers with short memories, the current debate over the privatization of education began in the late 1980s, when Christopher Whittle invaded American classrooms with his commercial television news outlet, Channel One, and then laid...

Will privatizing schools really help inner-city students of color?
September 1, 1994... More than a decade ago, low-income African-American parents in the inner-city o Philadelphia identified what they saw as the most urgent educational needs of their children: the acquisition of basic skills (reading, writing, and numerica...

Entrepreneurship: the road to salvation for public schools.
September 1, 1994... By pooling the talent and resources of seasoned educators and the private sector, Education Alternatives, Inc. is reinvigorating school systems in severa cities. What is a nice public school educator doing in a company like Education...

We cannot ignore the alternatives.
September 1, 1994... Like it or not, the ultimate adoption of some of these alternatives seems inevitable. All the rhetoric our colleagues can muster against alternative education, privatization, the advance of capitalism into our classrooms, vouchers, and so...

The media's myth of school failure.
September 1, 1994... Good things are happening in U.S. schools, but the media don't seem to want to know about them. These days, a fact is not a fact until the media have anointed it, and in the case of education, the media have decided to bless only the...

Why Deming and OBE don't mix. (statistics educator W. Edwards Deming; outcome-based education)
September 1, 1994... Outcome-based education is not compatible with Deming's ideas about the management of quality The central idea in W. Edwards Deming's approach to the management of quality i the need to improve process, and the central defect of...

The language of OBE reveals its limitations. (outcome-based education)
September 1, 1994... Advocates of outcome-based education use mechanistic terminology suggestive of the business world, not organic words that speak of reflection, serendipity, an discovery. The work of a teacher--exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never twice...

Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don't.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... You finally have the bather dry, with teeth brushed and jammies on. "Let's read!" you say. "Okay, this," he says, choosing a book. "Just don't ask me to say any words. I hate reading!" In that one brief, honest declaration, you hear your son...

And Then There Were Two: Children and Second Language Learning.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... Considering the astonishing rate at which immigrant youngsters are pouring into our nation's schools, English language acquisition now looms as one of education's most important challenges. As a result, English as a Second Language, once the...

Preventing Early School Failure: Research, Policy, and Practice.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... Preventing Early School Failure does a thorough job of evaluating early intervention projects designed to prevent reading failure in the early grades. The projects are considered in clusters: from birth to age 3, preschool, full-day and...