Standards Reform in High-Poverty Schools: Managing Conflict and Building Capacity
By Carol A. Barnes with a forward by David K. Cohen

Teachers College Press, 2002

This extraordinary view of "reform in action" illustrates what actually happens when school reform encounters a high-poverty, linguistically diverse school, that is, when policy ambitions collide with school realities. Based on two years of observation and interviews, the author shows how professional identities, social resources, and conflicting purposes shaped one elementary school’s capacity to understand and implement state-mandated reforms. Like many American schools, Mission Elementary embodies the disputes as well as the challenges that are central concerns of today’s educational reforms.

Featuring vivid portraits of teachers and administrators, this extremely timely book:

• Helps us to understand the processes involved in improving the performances of teachers, school leaders, and students in high-poverty settings–especially the pedagogical aspects of policy and program implementation and the complex issues of social and individual change.
• Brings together the ideas of conflict and capacity in ways no other book has, exploring what the staff brought to the task of school renewal in terms of understanding, experience, and belief; what they were able to learn; what conventional resources they had; and how they used those resources.
• Sheds much-needed light on the implementation of one of the most ambitious education reform attempts in recent history, the standards reforms in California.

Thinking Like a Teacher: Using Observational Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning
By Samuel J. Meisels, Helen L. Harrington, Patricia McMahon, Margo L. Dichtelmiller, and Judy R. Jablon

Allyn & Bacon, 2002

Based on the Work Sampling System, this highly practical book provides directions and worksheets so that teachers can effectively use observational assessments to gauge students' learning in a variety of grades and subjects.

Thinking Like a Teacher will help prospective teachers connect child development, instruction, and curriculum to teaching, learning, and assessment. It will help prospective teachers develop their ability to make reasoned and responsible decisions, gain a sense of what to look for while observing students, what to document about children's learning, and how to assess the impact of one's personal performance and achievement. The text contains more than 40 hands-on assignments that form a basis for continuing professional exploration and that help new teachers meet national standards regarding the use of performance assessment.

Inequality at the Starting Gate: Social Background Differences in Achievement as Children Begin School
By Valerie E. Lee and David Burkam

Economic Policy Institute, 2002.

Inequality at the Starting Gate is a new EPI study of the learning gap between rich and poor children when they enter kindergarten. This study, by two education experts from the University of Michigan, analyzes U.S. Education Department data on 16,000 kindergartners nationwide, showing the direct link between student achievement gaps and socioeconomic status. The report finds that impoverished children lag behind their peers in reading and math skills even before they start school. It shows how a lack of resources and opportunities can cause lasting academic damage to some children, underscoring the need for earlier and more comprehensive efforts to prepare children to succeed in school.

Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods, Second Edition
By Stephen W. Raudenbush, Anthony S. Bryk

Sage Publications, 2002

The revision you’ve been waiting for is here! Popular in the first edition for its rich, illustrative examples and lucid explanations of the theory and use of hierarchical linear models (HLM), the book has been reorganized into four parts with four completely new chapters. The first two parts, Part I on "The Logic of Hierarchical Linear Modeling" and Part II on "Basic Applications" closely parallel the first nine chapters of the previous edition with significant expansions and technical clarifications, such as:

• An intuitive introductory summary of the basic procedures for estimation and inference used with HLM models that only requires a minimal level of mathematical sophistication in Chapter 3
• New section on multivariate growth models in Chapter 6
• A discussion of research synthesis or meta-analysis applications in Chapter 7
• Data analytic advice on centering of level-1 predictors and new material on plausible value intervals and robust standard estimators

While the first edition confined its attention to continuously distributed outcomes at level 1, this second edition now includes coverage of an array of outcomes types in Part III:

• New Chapter 10 considers applications of hierarchical models in the case of binary outcomes, counted data, ordered categories, and multinomial outcomes using detailed examples to illustrate each case
• New Chapter 11 on latent variable models, including estimating regressions from missing data, estimating regressions when predictors are measured with error, and embedding item response models within the framework of the HLM model
• New introduction to the logic of Bayesian inference with applications to hierarchical data (Chapter 13)

The authors conclude in Part IV with the statistical theory and computations used throughout the book, including univariate models with normal level-1 errors, multivariate linear models, and hierarchical generalized linear models. Plus, there’s a new Website link so that readers can download the data sets and access additional technical material.