Samuel Casey Carter's new book, On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character, offers broad principles, case studies and great snapshots of schools that succeed in providing all kinds of students with an engaging, purpose-driven education. Here's my review in The Weekly Standard. On Purpose is the culmination of Carter's work at the Center for Education Reform, a Washington, D.C. education reform advocy group that has collected a goldminen of information on what makes schools great. Carter first grabbed the attention of eduction reformers when he wrote No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High=Performing, High=Poverty Schools, which repudiated the long-standing argument that poor children couldn't excell.
Waiting for Superman
Waiting for Superman will transform your understanding of the problems that besest our broken public school system. In my two commentaries for Headline Bistro, I begin with the fight over the soul of public education led by Michelle Rhee and end with a look at the Catholic Church's own "superman" moment, as large nubmers of Catholic schools continue to close every year, a trend hitting inner-city students the hardest. After I posted my comments, I found tht Archbishop Dolan of New York had already made another connection with the documentry film: he suggested that Catholic schools provided an answer to the problems of inner-city schools.
Posted at 08:23 PM in Catholic education/schools, Dolan/Catholic Schools, Education Reform, film review/commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)