Matthew Knoester, assistant professor of education at the University of Evansville, has published a new book, Democratic Education in Practice: Inside the Mission Hill School.
Published through Teachers College Press, the book evaluates and describes a high-performing public school in Boston. The book describes the school’s successes — such as a high college attendance rate by its graduates and the portfolio process required for graduation — and also the challenges faced by schools like Mission Hill, including pressure to teach to standardized tests.
“The Mission Hill School is a small, personal, but informal K-8 learning environment where teachers hold high standards for children, who rise to those standards while taking a large amount of ownership over their own learning,†Knoester said. “Even if school leaders elsewhere cannot replicate the school due to various constraints, I hope there are parts that educators will find useful.”
“Matthew Knoester has done us an enormous favor by showing us, in detail, what could be — one example of how schools can be the building blocks for democracy, recreating community for all to taste, feel, hear, and see,†said Deborah W. Meier, author of the book’s foreword and a MacArthur Fellow who founded Mission Hill School.
Knoester is a National Board Certified Teacher and former teacher at the Mission Hill School in Boston, as well as schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Olaf College, his Master of Education degree from Harvard University, and his PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Knoester has published articles in journals such as Educational Policy; Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy; Pedagogy, Culture & Society; and Schools: Studies in Education. He is also the editor of the book International Struggles for Critical Democratic Education (Peter Lang Publishing, 2012).
Democratic Education in Practice: Inside the Mission Hill School is available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Teachers College Press.
Mission Hill School recent standardized test scores leave a lot to be desired.
http://www.greatschools.org/modperl/achievement/ma/342#toc
Great Schools rates schools on academic performance with a range from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best performing schools. So Mission Hill School’s 3 rating seems to be deserved when on looks at the State Average test score and compares it to Mission Hill’s test score for each grade and subject tested.
I certainly would NOT call this school a “high performing” school. In fact, it looks like even with all the attention and effort, the experiment failed.
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Good gravy! This is a school that spends over $20,000 per year on each student, has only 168 pupils, one teacher for each 14 kids and still is doing worse than they were in 2007, 2008 and 2009 in most subjects at each grade level.
Nothing like the education community producing slanted material to be read by others who are too lazy to do a little research and swallow the presentation whole.
Thanks, Press.
The school is failing and the supposed “building blocks for democracy” that they are creating will fail society too.
GIGO: garbage in, garbage out! It is impossible for “best practices” to produce these kind of academic results. The academic results are proof of your failed program.
If the book has any value at all it is in demonstrating how the liberal social agenda is robbing students of an education!
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