Confessions of a School Reformer
In Confessions of a School Reformer, eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. Cuban begins his own story in the 1930s, when he entered first grade at a Pittsburgh public school, the youngest son of Russian immigrants who placed great stock in the promises of education. With a keen historian's eye, Cuban expands his personal narrative to analyze the overlapping social, political, and economic movements that have attempted to influence public schooling in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. He documents how education both has and has not been altered by the efforts of the Progressive Era of the first half of the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s through the 1970s, and the standards-based school reform movement of the 1980s through today. Cuban points out how these dissimilar movements nevertheless shared a belief that school change could promote student success and also forge a path toward a stronger economy and a more equitable society. He relates the triumphs of these school reform efforts as well as more modest successes and unintended outcomes. Interwoven with Cuban's evaluations and remembrances are his "confessions," in which he accounts for the beliefs he held and later rejected, as well as mistakes and areas of weakness that he has found in his own ideology. Ultimately, Cuban remarks with a tempered optimism on what schools can and cannot do in American democracy.
Dirty Waters
A wry, no-holds-barred memoir of Nelson’s time controlling some of Chicago's most beautiful spots while facing some of its ugliest traditions. In 1987, the city of Chicago hired a former radical college chaplain to clean up rampant corruption on the waterfront. R. J. Nelson thought he was used to the darker side of the law—he had been followed by federal agents and wiretapped due to his antiwar stances in the sixties—but nothing could prepare him for the wretched bog that constituted the world of a Harbor Boss. Dirty Waters is the wry, no-holds-barred memoir of Nelson’s time controlling some of the city’s most beautiful spots while facing some of its ugliest traditions. Nelson takes us through Chicago's beloved “blue spaces” and deep into the city’s political morass, revealing the different moralities underlining three mayoral administrations and navigating the gritty mechanisms of the city’s political machine. Ultimately, Dirty Waters is a tale of morality, of what it takes to be a force for good in the world and what struggles come from trying to stay ethically afloat in a sea of corruption.
Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer
The Chandra Shekhar Government Had Fallen. Fresh Elections Had Been Called. Yashwant Sinha, Finance Minister In The Caretaker Government, Was In Patna, Contesting For The Lok Sabha Against Tough Opposition, When A Senior Officer From The Finance Ministry Brought An Urgent File For His Signature: India Needed To Mortgage Gold To Obtain A Loan From The Bank Of England To Tide Over A Payments Crisis There Were Just Enough Foreign Exchange Reserves To Pay For Two Weeks Imports. The Crisis Was Not Of Their Government S Making, But It Devolved On Sinha To Take This Drastic Step. If He Ever Got The Opportunity, He Promised Himself, He Would Make Sure That The Country Never Had To Face Such A Crisis Again. The Opportunity Came In 1998, When Sinha Was Appointed Finance Minister In The Nda Government Led By Vajpayee And Was Faced With Yet Another Crisis: The Nuclear Tests In May That Year Resulted In Sanctions And A Possible Flashpoint. The Finance Minister S Decision To Issue The Resurgent India Bonds Helped Tide Over It, Raising 4.25 Billion In Two Weeks From Nris, And The Country Hasn T Looked Back Since. Yashwant Sinha Was Finance Minister For Four Years, Until 2002, And Presented Five Budgets. In Confessions Of A Swadeshi Reformer He Gives Us The Inside Story Of How The Framework For The Growth That Has Taken Place Subsequently Was Laid In That Time. From The Reforms That Were Initiated To The Politics That Threatened All Initiative, The Opposition From Within The Party As Also Outside It, Which Tried To Derail The Process, Sinha Pulls No Punches In This Candid Memoir. Nor Does He Shy Away From Discussing The Attempts To Cut Him Down To Size, Including The Proposal To Split Up The Ministry Of Finance, And The Various Controversies Of The Time From The Two Uti Scams To The Flex Industries Case And The Mauritius Tax Treaty Case (In Which He Was Alleged To Have Favoured His Daughter-In-Law), All Of Which He Faced With Equanimity And Strength Of Character. There Are, Besides, Piquant Observations On The Jostling For Position And Prime Postings That Any Minister Has To Face. In The Popular Eye, The Finance Minister Is Often Seen As A Taxing Machine, A Man Entrusted, As One British Chancellor Of The Exchequer Put It, With A Certain Amount Of Misery Which Is His Duty To Distribute As Fairly As He Can. This May Perhaps Be True, But, As This Memoir Shows, The Finance Minister Can Also Bestow A Few Pleasant Surprises.
Beyond the Skills Gap
How can educators ensure that young people who attain a postsecondary credential are adequately prepared for the future? Matthew T. Hora and his colleagues explain that the answer is not simply that students need more specialized technical training to meet narrowly defined employment opportunities. Beyond the Skills Gap challenges this conception of the “skills gap,” highlighting instead the value of broader twenty-first-century skills in postsecondary education. They advocate for a system in which employers share responsibility along with the education sector to serve the collective needs of the economy, society, and students. Drawing on interviews with educators in two- and four-year institutions and employers in the manufacturing and biotechnology sectors, the authors demonstrate the critical importance of habits of mind such as problem solving, teamwork, and communication. They go on to show how faculty and program administrators can create active learning experiences that develop students’ skills across a range of domains. The book includes in-depth descriptions of eight educators whose classrooms exemplify the effort to blend technical learning with the cultivation of twenty-first-century habits of mind. The study, set in Wisconsin, takes place against the backdrop of heated political debates over the role of public higher education. This thoughtful and nuanced account, enriched by keen observations of postsecondary instructional practice, promises to contribute new insights to the rich literature on workforce development and to provide valuable guidance for postsecondary faculty and administrators.
