In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved—and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning? The authors of this illuminating book identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors for improvement, including school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a student-centered learning climate. In addition, they analyze the impact of social dynamics, including crime, critically examining the inextricable link between schools and their communities. Putting their data onto a more human scale, they also chronicle the stories of two neighboring schools with very different trajectories. The lessons gleaned from this groundbreaking study will be invaluable for anyone involved with urban education.
“An indispensable text for understanding educational racial injustice and contributing to initiatives to mitigate it.” —Educational Theory American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind—the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior—they show how philosophers, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W.E.B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts. Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we can’t expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.
Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades shows how teachers in grades 5–8 can leverage the use of personalized learning plans (PLPs) to increase student agency and engagement, helping youth to establish learning goals aligned with their interests and assess their own learning—particularly around essential skills that cut across disciplines. Drawing on their research and work with fifty schools in Vermont, where PLPs are used statewide, the authors show how personalized learning aligns with effective middle grades practice and provide in-depth examples of how educators have implemented PLPs in a wide range of schools representing different demographics and grade configurations. They also highlight five critical roles for teachers in personalized learning environments—as empowerer, scaffolder, scout, assessor, and community builder—and illustrate how teachers can adapt the PLP process for their own unique contexts. Grounded in experience and full of engaging examples, artifacts, and tools, the book builds on the emerging field of personalized learning and connects it with the developmental needs of middle schoolers to provide a unique and valuable resource for individual classroom teachers, teacher teams, school leaders, teacher‐educators, and others.
An expanded narrative of the rich, unique history of the University of Chicago. One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than one hundred and fifty countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting. With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College from 1992 to 2023, thoroughly engages with the history and the lived politics of the university. Boyer presents a history of a complex academic community, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the university to sustain itself through decades of change. He has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact. Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community. Boyer’s tale is filled with larger-than-life characters—John D. Rockefeller, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and many other famous figures among them—and episodes that reveal the establishment and rise of today’s institution. Newly updated, this edition extends through the presidency of Robert Zimmer, whose long tenure was marked by significant developments and controversies over subjects as varied as free speech, medical inequity, and community relations.
For generations, visitors, journalists, and social scientists alike have asserted that Chicago is the quintessentially American city. Indeed, the introduction to "The New Chicago" reminds us that to know America, you must know Chicago. The contributors boldly announce the demise of the city of broad shoulders and the transformation of its physical, social, cultural, and economic institutions into a new Chicago. In this wide-ranging book, twenty scholars, journalists, and activists, relying on data from the 2000 census and many years of direct experience with the city, identify five converging forces in American urbanization which are reshaping this storied metropolis. The twenty-six essays included here analyze Chicago by way of globalization and its impact on the contemporary city; economic restructuring; the evolution of machine-style politics into managerial politics; physical transformations of the central city and its suburbs; and race relations in a multicultural era. In elaborating on the effects of these broad forces, contributors detail the role of eight significant racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in shaping the character of the new Chicago and present ten case studies of innovative governmental, grassroots, and civic action. Multifaceted and authoritative, "The New Chicago" offers an important and unique portrait of an emergent and new Windy City.
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