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The Right to Learn

Name: The Right to Learn
Author: Linda Darling-Hammond
ISBN: 9780787902612

by Linda Darling-Hammond

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Overview

In this important book, one of the nation's most respected educators, Linda Darling-Hammond, describes learner-centered schools that work for students in all kinds of communities and outlines the policies and practices that are needed to create these schools on a systemwide basis. Using in-depth interviews with dozens of teachers and studies of many successful schools, Darling-Hammond shows that good schools best serve learners by allowing good teaching to flourish, reducing bureaucratic demands, favoring competence over procedures, nurturing and rewarding professional development, supporting curriculum and assessment that are relevant and challenging, and stimulating inside-out change.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Darling-Hammond education, Columbia Univ. plants herself squarely in the middle of what is fast becoming a significant school reform debate among such folks as E.D. Hirsch The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, LJ 10/1/96 and Philip Schlechty Inventing Better Schools, Jossey-Bass, 1996. While Hirsch concentrates on educational objectives and Schlechty focuses on the knowledge work of students, Darling-Hammond's approach relies on restructuring the basic dynamics of schooling: teacher-student relations, professionalism, and school administration. Her argument is compelling because it relies on years of observation of several such restructured schools. The book's major strength is the author's comprehensive reform goals, which address practically every impediment to structural change. Essential for education collections.Jessica George, Illinois State Univ. Lib., Normal

Booknews

Describes the system wide changes in policy and practice needed to make America's both learner centered and learning centered. The author argues that former school reform movements emphasized getting around the system and didn't realize that leaving the system in place was what ultimately doomed their efforts. She argues for an overhaul in education that stresses teachers over bureaucracy, and competence over procedures. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.