released a remarkab le report, A Nation at Risk. This Report has s t imulated in the media considerable discussion about the problems in our schools, speculation about the causes, and ass ignment of blame. Astonishingly, f e w of the media reports have focused on the specific f indings and recommendat ions of the Commission. A lmos t none of the med ia reports tells that the Commission i tsel f re frained f rom speculation on causes and f rom assignment of blame. Because of the extraordinary clarity and importance of the Commission's Report, the editors of the Communica t ions decided to reprint the Report's main section in its entirety. We are p leased to present it to you here.

A nation at risk: the imperative for educational reform

In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. This article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that rely solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Rather, the article attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, the article attempts to explicate the theoretical framework of the author in the nexus of collaborative and reflexive research. The pedagogical practices of eight exemplary teachers of African-American students serve as the investigative “site.” Their practices and reflections on those practices provide a way to define and recognize culturally relevant pedagogy.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1163320.pdf

Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

It seems only fair that the reader know what biases, if any, inform the summary remarks I plan to make. Equity will be the focus of my discussion. By equity I mean a simple sense of fairness in the dis tribution of the primary goods and services that characterize our social order. At issue is the efficacy of a minimum level of goods and services to which we are all entitled. Some of us, rightly, have more goods and services than others, and my sense of equity is not disturbed by that fact. Others of us have almost no goods and access to only the most wretched serv ices, and that deeply offends my simple sense of fair ness and violates the standards of equity by which I judge our social order. I measure our progress as a social order by our willingness to advance the equity interests of the least among us. Thus, increased wealth or education for the top of our social order is quite beside the point of my basis for assessing our progress toward greater equity. Progress requires public policy that begins by making the poor less poor and ends by making them not poor at all. This discussion of edu cation will apply just such a standard to public school ing. Equitable public schooling begins by teaching poor children what their parents want them to know and ends by teaching poor children at least as well as it teaches middle-class children. Inequity in American education derives first and foremost from our failure to educate the children of the poor. Education in this context refers to early acquisition of those basic school skills that assure pupils successful access to the next level of schooling. If that seems too modest a standard, note that as of now the schools that teach the children of the poor are dismal failures even by such a modest standard. Thus, to raise a generation of children whose schools meet such a standard would be an advance in equity of the first order. I offer this standard at the outset to note that its attainment is far more a matter of politics than of social science. Social science refers to those formal experiments and inquiries carried out by

/pdf/effective-schools-for-the-urban-poor-33tri9ik9b.pdf

Effective Schools for the Urban Poor

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relative impact of different types of leadership on students' academic and nonacademic outcomes.Research Design:The methodology involved an analysis of findings from 27 published studies of the relationship between leadership and student outcomes. The first meta-analysis, including 22 of the 27 studies, involved a comparison of the effects of transformational and instructional leadership on student outcomes. The second meta-analysis involved a comparison of the effects of five inductively derived sets of leadership practices on student outcomes. Twelve of the studies contributed to this second analysis.Findings: The first meta-analysis indicated that the average effect of instructional leadership on student outcomes was three to four times that of transformational leadership. Inspection of the survey items used to measure school leadership revealed five sets of leadership practices or dimensions: establishing goals and expectations; resourcing strategi...

/pdf/the-impact-of-leadership-on-student-outcomes-an-analysis-of-pkvbxscy8z.pdf

The Impact of Leadership on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Differential Effects of Leadership Types

/pdf/effective-schools-a-review-575v0q0c9k.pdf

Effective Schools: A Review

E ducators have become increas ingly convinced that the charac teristics of schools are important determinants of academic achievement. Since 1978 an extraordinary number and variety of school improvement pro grams have concentrated on a school effects interpretation of the relationship between achievement and family back ground. Such programs represent a ma jor educational reform and derive from a fairly rapid educator acceptance of the research of Brookover and Lezotte (1977), Edmonds(1979), ftutter (1979), and a number of others who have stud ied characteristics of both effective and ineffective schools.

Ronald R. Edmonds

Papers

Effective Schools for the Urban Poor

Programs of School Improvement: An Overview.

Making Public Schools Effective.

Search for Effective Schools.

School Effects and Teacher Effects.