Making Large Schools Work: The Advantages of Small Schools

Arthur Shapiro

doi:10.5771/9781607091172

Summary

American schools are undergoing huge changes, among the most significant of which is that their size is increasing rapidly. This book lays out very practical approaches to making our ever-increasingly large schools work more effectively. By closely analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of large schools, the author can provide effective tools and strategies for dealing with them. Shapiro digs away at the foreseen and unforeseen consequences of this rapid escalation of size, and presents practical, tried-and-true strategies for undoing some of the more unfortunate results of this social trend or drift.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2009
Copyright Year: 2009
ISBN-Print: 978-1-60709-115-8
ISBN-Online: 978-1-60709-117-2
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 194
Product Type: Monograph

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
3. Dedication No access
4. Preface No access
1. Chapter 1. Size Really Matters: A Sea of Troubles (Why Do We Have Problems Making Large Schools Work?) Comparing and Contrasting Large and Small Schools No access
2. Chapter 2. Our Assumptions and Beliefs Drive Us: We Hardly Realize What They Are—and That They Do No access
1. Chapter 3. How to Make Sure We Stay Afloat (How to Work with the Dynamics of the School, So We Don’t Screw Up Too Badly) and How to Create a Healthy Subculture in the Process No access
2. Chapter 4. Hidden Eddies That Can Drive Us Off Course: Metaphors and Images of Organizations That Often Dominate Our Thinking—and a Curriculum-Steering Task Force That Generates Controlled Change as a Routine No access
3. Chapter 5. Five Hidden Whirlpools (Pulls, or Centers of Influence) That the Five Parts of Organizations Inevitably Generate No access
4. Chapter 6. Adrift, Out of Control, Plunging Over the Waterfall? (OK, Once We Get Our Schools Productive, How Do We Keep Them There?) No access
5. Chapter 7. Power and Its Uses: Sink or Swim No access
6. Chapter 8. Leadership—The Impact of the Honcho (If We Find a Honcho to Diagnose and to Steer Us Through Shoals) No access
1. Chapter 9. Paddling into the Current: Top-Down Change Strategies, and This One—How to Pull It Off: Making Plans Work by Finessing Resistance No access
1. Chapter 10. Example 1: Beliefs, Myths, and Realities: Decentralizing a Rogue Junior High into a Model Middle School (Despite the Riptides) No access
2. Chapter 11. Example 2: Moving a Large Elementary School into a Decentralized Constructivist Model (and the Scores Jumped Up) No access
3. Chapter 12. Example 2, Continued: Success! Three (and, Postscript, Now Five) Years of Constructivism Spectacular: Changes—and the Scores JumpedUp (Still Perking, but Needing to Replan) No access
4. Chapter 13. Example 3: Making a Large Inner-City High School Work by Decentralizing It —Steering ItThrough the Currents No access
1. Chapter 14. Summing Up Very Briefly: Size Really Matters—Decentralization Works—Seawalls Revisited: Four Infrastructures to Keep Renewal Process Surging No access
Appendix A. No access Pages 185 - 186
Bibliography No access Pages 187 - 192
About the Author No access Pages 193 - 194