Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools

Deficient urban schooling remains one of America's most pressing—and stubborn—public policy problems. This important new book details and evaluates a radical and promising new approach to K-12 education reform. Strife and Progress explains for a broad audience the "portfolio strategy" for providing urban education—its rationale, implementation, and results. Under the portfolio strategy, cities use anything that works, indifferent to whether schools are run by the public district or private entities. It combines traditional modes of schooling with newer methods, including chartering and experimentation with schools making innovative use of people and technology. Urban districts try to make themselves magnets for new talent, recruiting educators and career switchers looking to make a difference for poor children.The portfolio strategy creates interesting new bedfellows: people who think that government should oversee public education align with those advocating choice, competition, and entrepreneurship. It cuts across political lines and engages city governments and civic assets (e.g., philanthropies, businesses, universities) much more deeply than earlier reform initiatives. New York and New Orleans were portfolio pioneers, but the idea has spread rapidly to cities as far-flung as Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago.Results have been mixed overall but generally positive in places that implemented the strategy most aggressively. Reform leaders such as New York's Joel Klein have been overly optimistic, however, assuming that the strategy's merits would be so obvious that careful assessment would be unnecessary. Serious policy evaluation is still needed.

Politics & Social Sciences

Hill, Paul T.

Campbell, Christine

Gross, Betheny

Sociology

Brookings Institution Press

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Na Gaisgich (Crosgagan)

Stewart, Morag

Reference

Acair Ltd.

Jimmy is a fictional character and his story is based on what a young child might experience as he navigates his family's journey leaving an abusive situation and coming to the WCA (Women and Children's Alliance). It was written by the WCA's Communications Manager, Christine Campbell with input from the WCA's programs staff--specifically one of our clinicians who works with children and utilizes play therapy techniques.

Seeds of Hope

Children's Books

Growing Up & Facts of Life

Rediscovered Books

Sarah's husband, Tom, disappeared without trace eleven years ago. Now her son, David, has died. Tom appears at David's funeral and tries to reestablish contact, which Sarah refuses but Kate, her daughter, accepts. The growing closeness between Kate and her father worries Sarah because she believes that Tom is dishonest and unreliable, that he abandoned her and their two children all those years ago. So how can they trust him now? Then Sarah finds David's diary and follows the steps he took in search of his father, wanting to know whether he found him, whether he met him, and what happened. But, in following the steps David took, it becomes a journey of self-discovery for Sarah: what she uncovers forces her to reassess her view of herself, her origins and her certainties. A relationship novel, but also a detection novel with a difference; this story traces a woman's drive to uncover and understand the truth about a family she thought she knew - her own.

Family Matters

Literature & Fiction

Women's Fiction

YouWriteOn

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Books by Campbell, Christine