Creating New Educational Communities

Creating New Educational Communities brings together fourteen essays on reforming elementary and secondary school education in the United States. The essays focus on measures designed to fully exploit all students’ capacity to learn—even those who perform poorly on conventional intelligence tests or in traditional classroom settings.

The contributors feature reports on innovative projects implemented in schools across the United States. Goals of these projects include accommodating different styles of learning among students, encouraging greater participation in educational activities by parents from minority or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and increasing cooperation among teachers, administrators, parents, students, and community members.

The introduction presents an overview of the guiding principles, technical measures, and political concerns critical to the success of educational reform movements and individual chapters include assessments of the impact specific reforms are having on the quality of education, evaluations of their sustainability, and discussions of relevant theory, recent research, and current practices and policies.