Product Description

How do you get every school to be a good school? How, with thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands of teachers, do you get every lesson to be a great lesson? How do you ensure that every child leaves school with the knowledge, skills, and values that they need to be successful and happy in a rapidly changing world? This book is the story of a search for lessons about how to improve schools; a search that has stretched from the grasslands of Africa to the streets of New York, capturing lessons about school reform from more than 40 countries on every continent. It argues that massive improvement in schools is possible, that a small number of key changes would ensure that the next generation is better prepared for the future than any generation that has preceded it, and that, for the first time in human history, we know how to do it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39472 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Fenton Whelan works with governments and other organizations around the world to improve education systems. Michael Fullan is Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, and is recognized worldwide as an authority on education reform. Michael Barber led the implementation of reforms in England and now works supporting governments and other organizations around the world to deliver tangible improvements in education.

Customer Reviews

A must for anyone who cares about improving education
Whelan's analysis of what drives success in school systems around the world is hard hitting and disarmingly well informed. For centuries, policy makers, philanthropists and educators have worked to improve the performance of their schools. The journey has been a bumpy one, characterised often more by failure than by success, particularly where the approach has been siloed and incoherent. However, there has been success. Systems such as those in Finland, Singapore and Alberta show us that massive improvement and high performance in schools is possible, and yet the tools needed to achieve this have never been so lucidly captured as they are here.

Every country, every school system, every school and every child is different, and yet there are enough similarities across the board to allow for some uniform success factors. Whelan's book aims to detail what these success factors are, where they have been effective and why, and how they can be implemented. The result is a powerful collation of seminal research and Whelan's own wealth of experience told in an accessible, yet deeply erudite, way.

This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in reforming education.

A must read
This is by far the best book I have read on education policy. It's a substantial review of policies from all over the world and draws practical lessons from various contexts. It is concise, well written, heavily backed by research and very insightful. It should be made compulsory reading for anyone in education management and policy.