Description
Book SynopsisMeeting students’ basic needs – including ensuring they have access to nutritious meals and a sense of belonging and connection to school – can positively influence students’ academic performance. Recognizing this connection, schools provide resources in the form of school meals programs, school nurses, and school guidance counselors. However, these resources are not always available to students and are not always prioritized in school reform policies, which tend to focus more narrowly on academic learning. This book is about the balancing act that schools and their teachers undertake to respond to the social, emotional, and material needs of their students in the context of standardized testing and accountability policies. Drawing on conversations with teachers and classroom observations in two elementary schools,
How Schools Meet Students’ Needs explores the factors that both enable and constrain teachers in their efforts to meet students’ needs and the consequences of how schools organize this work on teachers’ labor and students’ learning.
Trade Review"The data is interesting and the stories are compelling.
How Schools Meet Students’ Needs is a significant contribution to a field without adequate attention."— Jennifer A. Reich, Author of Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines
"Kerstetter provides a vivid ethnographic account of how policies such as No Child Left Behind actually produce the opposite outcomes from what they supposedly aim to accomplish, constraining public schools from being able to effectively educate low-income children.
How Schools Meet Students’ Needs is well-written and easy to read."— Julia Sass Rubin, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy
"The data is interesting and the stories are compelling.
How Schools Meet Students’ Needs is a significant contribution to a field without adequate attention."— Jennifer A. Reich, Author of Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines
"Kerstetter provides a vivid ethnographic account of how policies such as No Child Left Behind actually produce the opposite outcomes from what they supposedly aim to accomplish, constraining public schools from being able to effectively educate low-income children.
How Schools Meet Students’ Needs is well-written and easy to read."— Julia Sass Rubin, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I The Work of Teaching
1 Beyond Standardized Testing: Meeting Students’ Social, Emotional, and Material Needs
Part II Oak Grove Elementary
2 Working in an Audit Culture: Surveillance and Teaching at Oak Grove Elementary
3 “This is the Most Dreadful Test”: The Hidden Curriculum of Standardized Testing
Part III City Charter School
4 Working as Part of a School Reform Movement: Urgency, Achievement Gaps, and Individual Responsibility
5 “I Would Love to Hear What You Have to Say”: Cultural Reproduction in Social and Emotional Learning
Conclusion
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
