Table of Contents

Introduction: Examining School Restructuring Efforts by G. Alfred Hess, Jr. Empowering Teachers Work That Is Real: Why Teachers Should Be Empowered by William Ayers Rural Science and Mathematics Education: Empowerment Through Self-Reflection and Expanding Curricular Alternatives by Mary Jo McGee Brown The Dangers of Assuming a Consensus for Change: Some Examples from the Coalition of Essential Schools by Donna E. Muncey and Patrick J. McQuillan Empowerment of Teachers in Dade County's School-Based Management Pilot by Marjorie K. Hanson, Don R. Morris, and Robert A. Collins Conflict in Restructuring the Principal-Teacher Relationship in Memphis by Carol Plata Etheridge and Thomas W. Collins Rural Responses to Kentucky's Education Reform Act by Pamelia Coe and Patricia J. Kannapel Empowering Parents The Case for Parent and Community Involvement by Donald R. Moore Who's Making What Decisions: Monitoring Authority Shifts in Chicago School Reform by G. Alfred Hess, Jr. and John Q. Easton School Reform in East Harlem: Alternative Schools vs. "Schools of Choice" by Diane Harrington and Peter W. Cookson, Jr. Anthropological Perspectives The Role of Anthropologists in Restructuring Schools by Thomas G. Carroll Critical Friends in the Frey: An Experiment in Applying Critical Ethnography to School Restructuring by John M. Watkins Through the Eyes of Anthropologists by G. Alfred Hess, Jr. Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

A much-needed examination of the impact of teachers and parents on the effort to improve our schools through restructuring, this book looks at professionalization and parent empowerment programs from the ground level rather than from the large-scale policy level.

About the Author

G. ALFRED HESS, JR. is Executive Director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance. One of the principal activists of the school reform effort in Chicago, his organization sponsored one of the three major pieces of legislation that constituted the Chicago School Reform Act and is also the primary independent monitor of the implementation of this act. He is the author of Restructuring Schools: Chicago Style and numerous articles.

Reviews

"This collection of essays pries open a much needed conversation about the politics of public sector educational reform. In the midst of George Bush's press for privatization, vouchers, and 'choice, ' few reformers or reform voyeurs, have had enough chutzpah to raise up the tough, controversial issues inside reform movements. Collectively these essays do just that. They address a terribly significant set of concerns about what's possible in the public sphere, and what it would take to sustain radical transformation of public schooling. As the first text to analyze critically a wide range of public sector 'reform experiments, ' the authors leave no one off the hook. Parents, unions, central districts, principals, superintendents, teachers, policy makers, reformers, and researchers are all positioned critically in relation to reform, and all invited to re-examine our relationship to educational restructuring."-Michelle Fine University of Pennsylvania