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JANUARY 2005

Excellence in Education: The Making Of Great Schools By Merri Rosenberg

Consider just a few of these issues: safe schools, how to better integrate technology into the curriculum, extending the school day and the school year, how much homework is too much, figuring out successful strategies to develop community-based schools, finding foreign language and science teachers, managing gender disparities in achievement and coping with testing.

Sound familiar? These concerns have been the stuff of staff development meetings and educational administrator conferences here for years, as teachers, principals and superintendents struggle to adjust to an ever more demanding, and swiftly changing, educational environment.

What’s different in this comprehensive and scholarly book, obviously destined for academic and policy-making circles, is that the educational system in question is that of the United Kingdom, which has in recent years been as convulsed by upheavals as our own system.
So the authors tackle many of the same questions and problems that have been the focus of similar research projects here, reaching many of the same conclusions. Particularly interesting was the calendar developed by one school, which offers a sequence of eight-week academic terms followed by two-week vacations, with only a four-week summer break, as a means to make instructional time more efficient.

Other British schools have experimented with having the school day start at 8 AM (commonplace here, but not there, where 9 AM has been the usual start time), offering homework clubs and after-school study support as part of an effort to deliver more effective academics to an increasingly diverse and often needy student population.
While the British have looked to America for models on how to deliver gifted and talented education—notably through the Johns Hopkins University National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth—and managing magnets and charter schools, British educators have turned their focus to France and Germany for inspiration on recasting their vocational education system.

This book would be a fascinating read for anyone interested in international education, and comparative education issues; through this exploration of the British system and its challenges, it is perhaps easier to identify precisely what educators in America need to do.#
Excellence in Education: The Making of Great Schools
By Cyril Tayor & Conor Ryan
(David Fulton, Publishers, London, UK 2005) 311 pp.

 

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