Tag Archives: School

Misunderstood Minds Searching for Success in School (2002)

Misunderstood Minds Searching for Success in School

Amazon.com

Misunderstood Minds is a captivating documentary that unreels like a topnotch drama–you’ll be on the edge of your seat while having a series of “aha” moments. The 90-minute production spends three years following five families with children who struggle with learning disabilities. One high-achieving boy’s strong memory masks his inability to read; the parents of a middle-school girl who has trouble focusing resist the solution (drugs). Not every story is a clear success, and one Boston teen slips through the cracks. The learning-problem experts and teachers do a superb job making a complex subject (children have “expressive language deficiency” or an “output problem”) entirely understandable. Directed and produced by Frontline filmmaker Michael Kirk and narrated by Nightline correspondent Chris Bury, the show is powerful as it trains the lens on these quotable kids and their often-heartbreaking journey. –Valerie J. Nelson

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The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (Paperback)

The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

From Publishers Weekly

Claiming that our current educational system teaches students to worship technology and consumerism, Postman argues for more humanistic “narratives” as the basis for schools. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

After 20 books (e.g., Technopoly, LJ 1/92), Postman, social critic par excellence, has returned to his original turf: education. Sharp, witty, and frequently quotable, he demolishes many leading popular themes as lacking in meaning. Education without spiritual content or, as he puts it, without a myth or narrative to sustain and motivate, is education without a purpose. That purpose used to be democracy and could still be, if only we were willing to look for the elements that unite rather than separate. Postman considers multiculturalism a separatist movement that destroys American unity. Diversity, however, is one of the themes he would employ in teaching language, history, and culture. (more…)

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Hardcover)

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

From Booklist

*Starred Review* As an education historian and former assistant secretary of education, Ravitch has witnessed the trends in public education over the past 40 years and has herself swung from public-school advocate to market-driven accountability and choice supporter back to public-school advocate. With passion and insight, she analyzes research and draws on interviews with educators, philanthropists, and business executives to question the current direction of reform of public education. In the mid-1990s, the movement to boost educational standards failed on political concerns; next came the emphasis on accountability with its reliance on standardized testing. Now educators are worried that the No Child Left Behind mandate that all students meet proficiency standards by 2014 will result in the dismantling of public schools across the nation. Ravitch analyzes the impact of choice on public schools, attempts to quantify quality teaching, and describes the da (more…)