Examines twentieth century reading education. This book explores attempts by educators and psychologists to answer theoretical as well as practical questions about why only some students developed literacy skills. It looks at the efforts to prevent reading failure as well as to aid those learners who had not learned to read.

Rich in practical information about the history of American education, Solving Education''s Problems Effectively encourages readers to analyze, prioritize, and synthesize historical information by applying it to current situations. Using more than thirty case studies, Giordano suggests solutions to issues that plague educators across the nation-from textbook quality to gender, race, and religion biases. The case studies are accompanied by activities to prompt educators to higher levels of thinking about the problems they face.

Although originally designed as instruments to gauge students' progress, tests eventually were used to modify curricula, learning materials, pedagogy, and many practical features of schooling. Tests were employed to shape attitudes toward national issues such as employment, immigration, and defense. Worried about the enormous consequences that were at stake, advocates and opponents pitched their cases to educators, parents, journalists, and policymakers and also targeted special audiences. Testing proponents pleaded with military leaders, businesspeople, and scholastic publishers while their adversaries appealed to job seekers, college applicants, racial minorities, and anti-establishmentarians. This book illustrates how all of these parties showed interest; many became passionate; and some decisively influenced the course of American educational testing.

This book focuses on the questions that parents recently have posed about textbooks.

Should educators pay students? Should they make them wear sunglasses, regulate their clothing, allow them to bring animals into classrooms, discourage them from playing videogames, or transform their schools into gymnasiums? These are some of the suggestions that Cockeyed Education examines. This book enables readers to differentiate substantive from cockeyed suggestionsfor improving schools.. It directs them to the suggestions that scholastic experts, politicians, and members of the public have made. Additionally, it introduces them to the case method. It helps them apply this analytical technique to events that range from early Chicago schooling to the 2009 economic stimulus package.

Parents have questions for school administrators. They want to know how they hire teachers, erect facilities, select learning materials, protect students, allocate budgets, use data, make forecasts, measure progress, and compete with for-profit schools. This book examines the questions they pose, the answers they elicit, the allies they attract, the adversaries they arouse, and the improvements they prod.

Teachers Go to Rehab examines the advice given to teachers from multiple critics both historically and recently. This book looks at the scope, cost, and impact of this advice to teachers, as well as the motives behind it. It poses precise questions about the groups that gave the advice. Who were they? What did they recommend? How did they estimate impact? How did they calculate costs? What aims did they profess? What aims did they conceal? Whom did they attract? Whom did they alienate? When did they succeed? When did they fail?