Search results for ""Author James W. Fraser""

The preparation of America's teachers is among the foremost issues facing education in the United States today. In this compelling account, James W. Fraser, an eminent historian of education, takes readers through two centuries of teacher preparation to uncover its development from colonial times to current standards-based models. Fraser examines a broad array of institutional arrangements, such as more familiar ""normal schools"" and less well-known arrangements, including teacher institutes and high school programs in rapidly expanding cities, segregated communities, rural areas, and Indian reservations. For any reader wishing to understand how to prepare teachers and reform schools, Fraser's incisive survey provides much-needed historical grounding.

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Examining teacher education in an international context, this book captures the diversity of the world's educators.Many countries confront surprisingly similar challenges in preparing K–12 educators for success, while national contexts also make for surprising differences. In Teaching the World's Teachers, education historians Lauren Lefty and James W. Fraser and their contributors make a convincing case for approaching these shared challenges from a more global and historically minded perspective. Written by education scholars from eleven different countries—Argentina, Brazil, Catalonia-Spain, China, England, Finland, Ghana, Israel, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States—this book provides histories of teacher education reforms between roughly 1980 and 2020. The authors show how international trends that emerged during this period collided with national and regional contexts to produce unique teacher education systems in different nations. While in some countries the embrace of markets and competition led to a deregulation of the teacher preparation field, in others teaching became a highly regulated and centralized affair. At the same time, ideas and structural models cross borders and education leaders borrow from each other while reshaping plans in each place.Opening with a broad historical overview of global teacher education models beginning in the late eighteenth century, Teaching the World's Teachers argues that the field has long been characterized by cross-border connections—but shaped by geopolitical hierarchies of power. In an era when teacher quality is widely recognized as one of the most important factors in a child's education, this volume encourages dialogue among teacher educators and policymakers around the world. By understanding the context and contingency of where we have been, the authors hope that readers will walk away with a more empowered sense of where we are headed in the all-important task of teaching the world's teachers.Contributors: Kwame Akyeampong, Richard Andrews, Azeem Badroodien, Maria Inês G. F. Marcondes de Souza, Gustavo E. Fischman, James W. Fraser, Guangwei Hu, Arie Kizel, Jari Lavonen, Lauren Lefty, Wei Liao, Jason Loh, Silvana Mesquita, Hannele Niemi, Lily Orland-Barak, Paula Razquin, Carol Anne Spreen, Eduard Vallory, Yisu Zhou

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Today, the ongoing controversy about the place-or lack of place-of religion in public schools is a burning issue in the United States. Prayer at football games, creationism in the classroom, the teaching of religion and morals, and public funding for private religious schools are just a few of the subjects over which people are skirmishing. In Between Church and State, historian and pastor James W. Fraser shows that these battles have been going on for as long as there have been public schools and argues there has never been any consensus about what the "separation of church and state" means for American society or about the proper relationship between religion and public education. Looking at the difficult question of how private issues of faith can be reconciled with the very public nature of schooling, Fraser's classic book paints a complex picture of how a multicultural society struggles to take the deep commitments of people of faith into account-including people of many different faiths and no faith. In this fully updated second edition, Fraser tackles the culture wars, adding fresh material on current battles over public funding for private religious schools. He also addresses the development of the long-simmering evolution-creationism debate and explores the tensions surrounding a discussion of religion and the accommodation of an increasingly religiously diverse American student body. Between Church and State includes new scholarship on the role of Roger Williams and William Penn in developing early American conceptions of religious liberty. It traces the modern expansion of Catholic parochial schools and closely examines the passage of the First Amendment, changes in American Indian tribal education, the place of religion in Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois's debates about African American schooling, and the rapid growth of Jewish day schools among a community previously known for its deep commitment to secular public education.

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Teacher education in America has changed dramatically in the past thirty years—with major implications for how our kids are taught.As recently as 1990, if a person wanted to become a public school teacher in the United States, he or she needed to attend an accredited university education program. Less than three decades later, the variety of routes into teaching is staggering. In Teaching Teachers, education historians James W. Fraser and Lauren Lefty look at these alternative programs through the lens of the past. Fraser and Lefty explain how, beginning in 1986, an extraordinary range of new teaching programs emerged, most of which moved teacher education out of universities. In some school districts and charter schools, superintendents started their own teacher preparation programs—sometimes in conjunction with universities, sometimes not. Other teacher educators designed blended programs, creating collaboration between university teacher education programs and other parts of the university, linking with school districts and independent providers, and creating a range of novel options. Fraser and Lefty argue that three factors help explain this dramatic shift in how teachers are trained: an ethos that market forces were the solution to social problems; long-term dissatisfaction with the inadequacies of university-based teacher education; and the frustration of school superintendents with teachers themselves, who can seem both underprepared and too quick to challenge established policy. Surveying which programs are effective and which are not, this book also examines the impact of for-profit teacher training in the classroom. Casting light on the historical and social forces that led to the sea change in the ways American teachers are prepared, Teaching Teachers is a substantial and unbiased history of a controversial topic.

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