Small Schools and Strong Communities

In this insightful book, Kenneth Strike develops a new vision of school reform. Arguing that good schools are first and foremost strong communities, Strike maintains that the small schools movement is the best hope to create such schools. He shows how the core assumptions that characterize the community paradigm” are preferable to those of standards-based reform and choice.

Kenneth A. Strike is Professor of Cultural Foundations at Syracuse University and Professor Emeritus of Education at Cornell University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and is a past president of the Philosophy of Education Society.

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction: Community, Small Schools, and School Reform	p. 1
Authentic Learning and Community	p. 1
School Reform: Old Paradigms in Older Bottles?	p. 4
Community and Small Schools: A Way Forward?	p. 8
Education and Community
Learning, Belonging, and School Reform: Why Community Is Necessary and Why Community Is Hard	p. 17
Why Community Is Necessary	p. 17
Why Community Is Hard	p. 22
Community and the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism	p. 28
The "Bads" of Community	p. 31
Schools That Are Communities and Schools That Are Not	p. 33
Schools as Communities	p. 38
Community and Normation	p. 38
Community and Shared Educational Projects	p. 46
The Four Cs of Community	p. 50
Community of Practice and Intellectual Community	p. 54
Community and the Core Goals of Education	p. 55
The Idea of a Practice and the Transformative Capacity of Practices	p. 60
Creating Communities of Practice	p. 63
Democratic Community: Creating a Polity	p. 66
If We Want Democratic Schools, What Do We Want?	p. 66
The Governance of Democratic School Communities	p. 68
Democratic Communities and Common Goods	p. 73
Equal Opportunity and Democratic Inclusion	p. 75
Democracy, Choice, and the Common School	p. 79
Democratic Schools and a Social Contract	p. 82
Small Schools, Community, and School Reform
Small Schools: Size or Community?	p. 87
Research on Small Schools	p. 88
What Is a Small School?	p. 93
Small Schools, Personalization, and Community	p. 99
Policies for Small Schools: Scaling Up, Keeping On	p. 105
Scaling Up: Principles for Creating Successful Small Schools	p. 106
Keeping On: Policies for Thriving School Communities	p. 113
Community and Small Schools: A New Paradigm for School Reform	p. 122
The Idea of a Paradigm	p. 123
Two Paradigms for Reform: Standards and Choice	p. 125
Motivation and More	p. 129
A Third Way of School Reform	p. 135
Community and Accountability	p. 138
The Common View of Accountability: Why It Is Dysfunctional	p. 140
Accountability for Community	p. 151
If Wishes Were Fishes: Conclusions, Doubts, and the Big Picture	p. 156
A Few Conclusions and Some Doubts	p. 156
Silver Bullets and the Big Picture	p. 164
References	p. 167
Index	p. 173
About the Author	p. 185
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Small Schools and Strong Communities

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials