Barbara Schneider

Gary Sykes

David N. Plank

Co-published by Routledge for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Educational policy continues to be of major concern. Policy debates about economic growth and national competitiveness, for example, commonly focus on the importance of human capital and a highly educated workforce. Defining the theoretical boundaries and methodological approaches of education policy research are the two primary themes of this comprehensive, AERA-sponsored Handbook. Organized into seven sections, the Handbook focuses on (1) disciplinary foundations of educational policy, (2) methodological perspectives, (3) the policy process, (4) resources, management, and organization, (5) teaching and learning policy, (6) actors and institutions, and (7) education access and differentiation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, the Handbook’s over one hundred authors address three central questions: What policy issues and questions have oriented current policy research? What research strategies and methods have proven most fruitful? And what issues, questions, and methods will drive future policy research? Topics such as early childhood education, school choice, access to higher education, teacher accountability, and testing and measurement cut across the 63 chapters in the volume. The politics surrounding these and other issues are objectively analyzed by authors and commentators. Each of the seven sections concludes with two commentaries by leading scholars in the field. The first considers the current state of policy design, and the second addresses the current state of policy research. This book is appropriate for scholars and graduate students working in the field of education policy and for the growing number of academic, government, and think-tank researchers engaged in policy research. For more information on the American Educational Research Association, please visit: http://www.aera.net/.

Handbook of Education Policy Research

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Diventare adulti. Gli adolescenti e l'ingresso nel mondo del lavoro

Mark Berends

Stephen Lamb

The SAGE Handbook of Sociology of Education offers a diverse and timely perspective on the intricate relationships between education and society, with expert contributions covering topics such as social stratification, educational policy, and the impact of COVID-19 on early childhood education.

The Sage Handbook of Sociology of Education

Explains the value of quasi-experimental techniques that can be used to approximate randomized experiments. The goal is to describe the logic of causal inference for researchers and policymakers who are not necessarily trained in experimental and quasi-experimental designs and statistical techniques.

Using Experimental and Observational Designs

Estimating Causal Effects

How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work

Becoming Adult

Sarah-Kathryn McDonald

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 2: Issues in Practice explores the challenges of implementing and assessing educational interventions in varied classroom contexts. Included are reflections on the challenges of designing studies for improving the instructional core of schools, guidelines for establishing evidence of interventions' impacts across a wide range of settings, and an assessment of national efforts to bring reform to scale in high-poverty schools.

Issues in Practice

Scale-Up in Education

Barbara L. Schneider

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 2: Issues in Practice explores the challenges of implementing and assessing educational interventions in varied classroom contexts. Included are reflections on the challenges of designing studies for improving the instructional core of schools, guidelines for establishing evidence of interventions' impacts across a wide range of settings, and an assessment of national efforts to bring reform to scale in high-poverty schools. This volume also includes findings and insights from several federally funded research projects charged with bringing conceptual and analytic rigor to studies of successful scale-up. All of the chapters address the challenges of conducting scientific research in schools and provide insights for obtaining the support of teachers and school administrators. The result is a highly readable volume ideally suited for educators interested in the issues that inform intervention research, researchers concerned with designing practical studies that are methodologically sound, and policymakers engaged in evidence-based school reform.

Scale-up in Education: Issues in practice

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 1: Ideas in Principle examines the challenges of 'scaling up' from a multidisciplinary perspective. It brings together contributions from disciplines that routinely take promising innovations to scale, including medicine, business, engineering, computing, and education. Together the contributors explore appropriate methods for estimating the effects of innovations in larger, more diverse settings and provide theories and models to guide the design of innovations most likely to remain viable at large scales. Specially-commissioned commentaries also discuss the analytical requirements and theoretical possibilities of a program of educational research on scale-up built upon these foundations. This volume is ideally suited for researchers, policymakers, and graduate students charged with determining the effectiveness of educational interventions. With its insights into the conceptual and methodological prerequisites for obtaining rigorous, actionable evidence of intervention effects, the volume provides reading for program evaluation courses in schools of education and public policy.

Scale-up in Education: Ideas in principle

Larry V. Hedges

Schools are complex social settings where students, teachers, administrators, and parents interact to shape a child’s educational experience. Any effort to improve educational outcomes for America’s children requires a dynamic understanding of the environments in which children learn. In The Social Organization of Schooling, editors Larry Hedges and Barbara Schneider assemble researchers from the fields of education, organizational theory, and sociology to provide a new framework for understanding and analyzing America’s schools and the many challenges they face. The Social Organization of Schooling closely examines the varied components that make up a school’s social environment. Contributors Adam Gamoran, Ramona Gunter, and Tona Williams focus on the social organization of teaching. Using intensive case studies, they show how positive professional relations among teachers contribute to greater collaboration, the dissemination of effective teaching practices, and ultimately, a better learning environment for children. Children learn more from better teachers, but those best equipped to teach often opt for professions with higher social stature, such as law or medicine. In his chapter, Robert Dreeben calls for the establishment of universal principles and practices to define good teaching, arguing that such standards are necessary to legitimize teaching as a high status profession. The Social Organization of Schooling also looks at how social norms in schools are shaped and reinforced by interactions among teachers and students. Sociologist Maureen Hallinan shows that students who are challenged intellectually and accepted socially are more likely to embrace school norms and accept responsibility for their own actions. Using classroom observations, surveys, and school records, Daniel McFarland finds that group-based classroom activities are effective tools in promoting both social and scholastic development in adolescents. The Social Organization of Schooling also addresses educational reforms and the way they affect a school’s social structures. Examining how testing policies affect children’s opportunities to learn, Chandra Muller and Kathryn Schiller find that policies which increased school accountability boosted student enrollment in math courses, reflecting a shift in the school culture towards higher standards. Employing a variety of analytical methods, The Social Organization of Schooling provides a sound understanding of the social mechanisms at work in our educational system. This important volume brings a fresh perspective to the many ongoing debates in education policy and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of America’s children.

The Social Organization of Schooling

Anthony Bryk

Most Americans agree on the necessity of education reform, but there is little consensus about how this goal might be achieved. The rhetoric of standards and vouchers has occupied center stage, polarizing public opinion and affording little room for reflection on the intangible conditions that make for good schools. Trust in Schools engages this debate with a compelling examination of the importance of social relationships in the successful implementation of school reform. Over the course of three years, Bryk and Schneider, together with a diverse team of other researchers and school practitioners, studied reform in twelve Chicago elementary schools. Each school was undergoing extensive reorganization in response to the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which called for greater involvement of parents and local community leaders in their neighborhood schools. Drawing on years longitudinal survey and achievement data, as well as in-depth interviews with principals, teachers, parents, and local community leaders, the authors develop a thorough account of how effective social relationships—which they term relational trust—can serve as a prime resource for school improvement. Using case studies of the network of relationships that make up the school community, Bryk and Schneider examine how the myriad social exchanges that make up daily life in a school community generate, or fail to generate, a successful educational environment. The personal dynamics among teachers, students, and their parents, for example, influence whether students regularly attend school and sustain their efforts in the difficult task of learning. In schools characterized by high relational trust, educators were more likely to experiment with new practices and work together with parents to advance improvements. As a result, these schools were also more likely to demonstrate marked gains in student learning. In contrast, schools with weak trust relations saw virtually no improvement in their reading or mathematics scores. Trust in Schools demonstrates convincingly that the quality of social relationships operating in and around schools is central to their functioning, and strongly predicts positive student outcomes. This book offer insights into how trust can be built and sustained in school communities, and identifies some features of public school systems that can impede such development. Bryk and Schneider show how a broad base of trust across a school community can provide a critical resource as education professional and parents embark on major school reforms. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

A Core Resource for Improvement

Trust in Schools

Peter W. Jr. Cookson

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Transforming Schools

Mustafa Yunus Eryaman

This volume draws together interdisciplinary approaches from political philosophy, social work, medicine and sociology to analyze the theoretical foundations and practical examples of evidence-based and evidence-informed education for the public good. It presents a range of conceptions of the evidence-based and evidence-informed education and a justification for why the particular examples or issues chosen fit within that conception for the sake of public good. It explores the current literature on evidence-based and evidence-informed educational policy, research and practice, and introduces a new term, ‘evidence free’, meaning actions of some policymakers who disregard or misuse evidence for their own agenda. The demands about the quality and relevance of educational research to inform the policy and practice have been growing over the past decade in response to the Evidence-Based Education movement. However the literature is yet to tackle the question of the interrelationships between evidence, research, policy and practice in education for the public good in an international context. This book fills that gap.

Evidence and Public Good in Educational Policy, Research and Practice

Joseph Krajcik

Jari Lavonen

An innovative, internationally developed system to help advance science learning and instruction for high school students This book tells the story of a $3.6 million research project funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at increasing scientific literacy and addressing global concerns of declining science engagement. Studying dozens of classrooms across the United States and Finland, this international team combines large-scale studies with intensive interviews from teachers and students to examine how to transform science education. Written for teachers, parents, policymakers, and researchers, this book offers solutions for matching science learning and instruction with newly recommended twenty-first-century standards.

The Value of Crafting Engagement in Science Environments

Learning Science

Linda J. Waite

Examines the work and family lives of dual-career couples and their children using multiple methods and perspectives.

Dual-Career Families and the Work-Life Balance

Being Together, Working Apart

Frauen sind keine Wunderwaffen, aber ein Gewinn! Wir können auf weibliche Führungskräfte nicht verzichten. Tun es aber ungeniert, am liebsten ganz oben. Woran liegt es, dass zwischen Wissen und Tun gerade beim Thema Frauen im Management eine so himmelweite Lücke klafft? Frauen sind top ausgebildet und bewegen sich hinsichtlich ihrer Kompetenz schon lange auf Augenhöhe mit den Männern. Den meisten Unternehmen gelingt es auch, Frauen und Männer in gleichem Maße zu rekrutieren, was aber nicht gelingt, ist, Frauen zu halten und an die Spitze zu bringen. Die Hürde für Frauen ist nicht das Reinkommen, die Hürde ist das Hochkommen. Der Schritt ins Topmanagement ist für Frauen nach wie vor der schwierigste und das liegt nicht nur an unserer männlichen Managementkultur, sondern ist unter anderem auch eine Frage des Kind-Karriere-Spagats und der privaten wie gesellschaftlichen Lebensumstände. Dr. Barbara Schneider nimmt nicht für sich in Anspruch, einfache Antworten für diese vielschichtige Thematik zu liefern. Vielmehr beleuchtet das Buch verschiedene Blickwinkel, gibt Anregungen und zeigt Erfahrungen auf. In diesem Sinne ist das Buch kein Ratgeber, sondern ein kompetent und tough geschriebenes Opinion Book.

Was sie nach oben bringt und was nicht

Frauen auf Augenhöhe

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 1: Ideas in Principle examines the challenges of 'scaling up' from a multidisciplinary perspective. It brings together contributions from disciplines that routinely take promising innovations to scale, including medicine, business, engineering, computing, and education. Together the contributors explore appropriate methods for estimating the effects of innovations in larger, more diverse settings and provide theories and models to guide the design of innovations most likely to remain viable at large scales.

Ideas in Principle

Hearing (Our) Voices describes two innovative participatory action research projects - one on communication with medical professionals, the other on housing - carried out by a group of people diagnosed with schizophrenia under the guidance of Professor Barbara Schneider. Participants designed the research, conducted interviews and focus groups, participated in data analysis, and disseminated research results through a number of innovative strategies including theatre performances, a documentary film, a graphic novel, and a travelling exhibit. Emerging from these projects is the central and significant finding that people diagnosed with schizophrenia are caught between their dependence on care and their longing for independent lives. The research presented in Hearing (Our) Voices points to a way to resolve this paradox and transform lives through the inclusion of people diagnosed with schizophrenia in research, in decision-making about their own treatment and housing, and in public discourse about schizophrenia.

Participatory Research in Mental Health

Hearing (our) Voices

This handbook unifies access and opportunity, two key concepts of sociology of education, throughout its 25 chapters. It explores today’s populations rarely noticed, such as undocumented students, first generation college students, and LGBTQs; and emphasizing the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity and social class. Sociologists often center their work on the sources and consequences of inequality. This handbook, while reviewing many of these explanations, takes a different approach, concentrating instead on what needs to be accomplished to reduce inequality. A special section is devoted to new methodological work for studying social systems, including network analyses and school and teacher effects. Additionally, the book explores the changing landscape of higher education institutions, their respective populations, and how labor market opportunities are enhanced or impeded by differing postsecondary education pathways. Written by leading sociologists and rising stars in the field, each of the chapters is embedded in theory, but contemporary and futuristic in its implications. This Handbook serves as a blueprint for identifying new work for sociologists of education and other scholars and policymakers trying to understand many of the problems of inequality in education and what is needed to address them.

Barbara Schneider

Books

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