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As president of Stanford University, the author of this book established a reputation as a tireless, forward-thinking advocate for higher education. His speeches, renowned for their intelligence, humanity, wit, and courage, confront head-on the most pressing concerns facing our nation’s universities. From affirmative action and multiculturalism to free speech, politics, public service and government regulation, this book addresses the controversial issues currently debated on college campuses and in our highest courts. Each chapter explores the context of these challenges to higher education and provides the author’s stirring orations delivered in response. In addressing these vital concerns, this book outlines the freedoms that a university must encourage and defend in the ongoing pursuit of knowledge.

This book presents a case study of two people learning to teach. It shows them engaging two groups of fourth-grade students in discussion about the meaning of texts—what the text terms “interpretive discussion.” The two groups differ with respect to race, geographical location, and affluence. As the novice teachers learn to clarify their own questions about meaning, they become better listeners and leaders of the discussions. Eventually, they mix the students from the two classrooms, and the reader watches them converse about a text as the barriers of race and class seem to break down. In addition to the detailed analysis of the case study, this book presents philosophical, literary, and psychological foundations of interpretive discussion and describes its three phases: preparation, leading, and reflection.

This book offers a compelling and uniquely detailed examination of the experiences of kindergarten students in California participating in a voluntary school desegregation program. It focuses on the day-to-day school life of a group of minority children bussed from their poor-performing home school district to an affluent neighboring district with high-performing schools. Through these kindergarteners' experiences, the book sensitively illuminates the processes of school transition, socialization, and adaptation, and addresses an array of important issues relating to American education. The book acutely observes these 'bus kids' and the quality of their social, emotional, cultural and academic experiences. It presents a moving picture of the complexity of challenges, often unrecognized by teachers and parents, each young student confronted every day.

Today's foreign language teachers are increasingly expected to be skilled in addressing multiple intelligences and differing learning styles, yet no reliable resources exist that consolidate the best of what is known about the broad spectrum of disabilities that are already or soon to be in our classrooms. This book offers critical and practical essays with insights applicable across the language-teaching spectrum. It brings together scholars and teachers from around the world who examine foreign language education from general requirements through advanced literature and film courses to study abroad, showing how to enable the success of students with disabilities at every step of the way. Chapters explore the nature of language itself, the best avenues toward acquiring proficiency, and the lives of disabled people at home and abroad.

An alarmingly high number of American students continue to lack proficiency in reading, maths, and science. The various attempts to address this problem have all too often resulted in “silver bullet” solutions such as reducing class sizes or implementing voucher programs. But this book shows, improving literacy also requires an understanding of complex and interrelated social issues that shape a child's learning. The book presents the most up-to-date research on the diverse factors that relate to a child's literacy development, from preschool to early elementary school.

This book refocuses the debate about school choice programs in America, with a non-partisan assessment of the nation's largest and longest-running private school voucher program—the high-profile Milwaukee experiment—and finds that the system undercuts the promise of school choice. The book argues that the Milwaukee experiment has not resulted in the one element necessary for school choice to be effective: an accountability system in which good schools thrive and poor schools close. It shows that most ingredients of a robust market are missing. Well-informed consumers (parents) are not the norm. State fiscal incentives are counterproductive and competition among public and choice schools is difficult to discern. The book concludes that school choice could succeed if certain conditions were met, and they offer guidelines to strengthen accountability and repair the voucher system.

This book presents a history of efforts to reform mathematics education in California throughout the last two decades of the 20th century. That history is a contentious one, full of such fervour and heat that participants and observers often refer to the “math wars”. The book considers the many perspectives of those involved in math reform, weaving a tapestry of facts, philosophies, conversations, events, and personalities into the narrative. While the focus is on California, the implications of this book extend to struggles over education policy and practice throughout the United States. The book's three-dimensional account of math education reform efforts reveals how the debates tend to be deeply ideological and how people come to feel misunderstood and misrepresented. It examines the myths used to explain the failure of reforms, the actual reasons for failure, and the importance of taking multiple perspectives into account when planning and implementing reform.

This book tells the story of the Yale University School of Medicine, tracing its history from its origins in 1810, when it had four professors and 37 students, to its present status as one of the world's outstanding medical schools. It focuses on the important relationship of the medical school to the university, which has long operated under the precept that one should heal the body as well as the soul. The book recounts events surrounding the beginnings of the medical school, the very perilous times it experienced in the middle-and late-19th century, and its revitalization, rapid growth, and evolution throughout the 20th century. It describes the colorful individuals involved with the school and shows how social upheavals, including wars, the Depression, boom periods, social activism, and the like, affected the school. The picture it paints is that of an institution that was at times unmanageable and underfunded, that often had troubled relationships with the New Haven community and its major hospital, but that managed to triumph over these difficulties and flourish. Today Yale University School of Medicine is a center for excellence. The book draws on the themes recurrent in its rich past to offer suggestions about its future.

Education reformers and policymakers argue that improved students' learning requires stronger academic standards, stiffer state tests, and accountability for students' scores. Yet these efforts seem not to be succeeding in many states. This book argues that effective state reform depends on conditions which most reforms ignore: coherence in practice as well as policy and opportunities for professional learning. The book draws on a decade's detailed study of California's ambitious and controversial program to improve mathematics teaching and learning. The book reports that state policy influenced teaching and learning when there was consistency among the tests and other policy instruments; when there was consistency among the curricula and other instruments of classroom practice; and when teachers had substantial opportunities to learn the practices proposed by the policy. These conditions were met for a minority of elementary school teachers in California. When the conditions were met for teachers, students had higher scores on state math tests. The book also shows that, for most teachers, the reform ended with consistency in state policy. They did not have access to consistent instruments of classroom practice, nor did they have opportunities to learn the new practices which state policymakers proposed. In these cases, neither teachers nor their students benefited from the state reform. This book offers insights into the ways policy and practice can be linked in successful educational reform and shows why such linkage has been difficult to achieve.

Although the essential books of Western civilization are no longer central in our courses or in our thoughts, they retain their ability to energize us intellectually, states this book. It presents a guide to some of these literary works, tracing the main currents of Western culture for all who wish to understand the roots of their civilization and the basis for its achievements. The book focuses on the productive tension between the classical and biblical strains in our civilization, between a life based on cognition and one based on faith and piety. It begins with the Iliad and Exodus, linking Achilles and Moses as Bronze Age heroic figures. Closely analysing texts and illuminating them in unexpected ways, it moves on to Socrates and Jesus, who “internalized the heroic”, continues with Paul and Augustine and their Christian synthesis, addresses Dante, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Moliere, and Voltaire, and concludes with the novel as represented by Crime and Punishment and The Great Gatsby. The book maintains that the dialectical tensions suggested by this survey account for the restlessness and singular achievements of the West and that the essential books can provide the substance and energy currently missed by both students and educated readers.