Books on the topic 'School Morale scores'

The book proposes to take stock of the situation of the studies of economic history of the pre-industrial age, in an attempt to grasp what – in the current state of European research – is the cultural scope and role of the discipline among the many specialisations of history and economic science. It analyses the different approaches that have characterised the various European historiography schools over time, as well as the evolution and prospects of directions of research; it reflects on the analysis of the sources, the methods that are at the basis of their use, and the interpretative questions that they pose for the academic. Finally it proposes the inclusion of economic history within the more general context of research, through an interdisciplinary comparison between the method proper to this discipline and that of other economic and social sciences.

This chapter discusses Ray Bradbury's achievement in fiction as a student at Los Angeles High School and his membership in Science Fiction League (SFL). It begins with a discussion of Bradbury's early obsession with Hollywood, as seen in his snapshots of scores of Hollywood stars and in more than a thousand autographs of Hollywood personalities, as well as with radio. It then considers Bradbury's fascination with the concept of space and on space and time travel during his time at Los Angeles High School; his participation in the activities of the Los Angeles SFL and editorial work with the organization; and his involvement with the school's poetry club known as “The Ink Beasts.” It also discusses how Bradbury's narratives were inspired by science fiction and fantasy pulps, such as those of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Finally, it recounts Bradbury's performance at a school production in May 1938.

This book explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. It focuses on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post-World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. At the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban–suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. As the book demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, the book argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.

When Children Refuse School: A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Approach, Parent Workbook is designed to help parents work with a therapist to help their children who currently have difficulties attending school. This workbook defines school refusal behavior, describes how situations might be evaluated, and shows what parents and therapists can do to get children back into school with less distress. Parents should use this workbook with a qualified therapist who is concurrently using the therapist guide to treat the child’s school refusal behavior. Problematic school absenteeism is the primary focus of the treatment program covered in the workbook. Youths who complete high school are more likely to be successful at social, academic, occupational, and economic aspects of functioning than youths who do not. Youths with problematic school absenteeism are at risk for lower academic performance and achievement, lower reading and mathematics test scores, fewer literacy skills, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, grade retention, involvement with the juvenile justice system, and dropout. The treatment program presented in this guide is designed for youths with primary and acute school refusal behavior. The program is based on a functional model of school refusal behavior that classifies youths on the basis of what reinforces their absenteeism.

Problematic school absenteeism is the primary focus of When Children Refuse School: A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Approach, Therapist Guide. Youths who complete high school are more likely to experience greater success at social, academic, occupational, and economic aspects of functioning than youths who do not. Youths with problematic school absenteeism are at risk for lower academic performance and achievement, lower reading and mathematics test scores, fewer literacy skills, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, grade retention, involvement with the juvenile justice system, and dropout. The treatment program presented here is designed for youths with primary and acute school refusal behavior. The program is based on a functional model of school refusal behavior that classifies youths on the basis of what reinforces absenteeism. For children who refuse school to avoid school-based stimuli that provoke negative affectivity, the treatment uses child-based psychoeducation, somatic control exercises, gradual reintroduction (exposure) to the regular classroom setting, and self-reinforcement. For children who refuse school to escape aversive social and/or evaluative situations, the treatment uses child-based psychoeducation, somatic control exercises, cognitive restructuring, gradual reintroduction (exposure) to the regular classroom setting, and self-reinforcement. For youths who refuse school to pursue attention from significant others, parent-based treatment includes modifying parent commands, establishing regular daily routines, developing rewards, reducing excessive reassurance-seeking behavior, and engaging in forced school attendance. For youths who refuse school to pursue tangible rewards outside of school, family-based treatment includes contingency contracts, communication skills, escorting the child to school and from class to class, and peer refusal skills.

Just as we often hear the unsupported claim that any kid could have made a work of abstract expressionism, we also often hear the claim (equally unsupported) that arts education makes our kids smarter. This is a claim about alleged transfer of learning from the arts to a non-arts outcome. Arts-infused schools, it is said, will raise academic achievement and standardized test scores. Music lessons will raise a child’s IQ. Research discussed here tests these claims, showing that they are unsubstantiated. We will have to look elsewhere for the value of an arts education. The more likely outcomes of quality arts education are not IQ and test score improvements but rather broad habits of mind—learning to observe closely, learning to envision, learning to explore and learn from mistakes, learning to stick with something over time, and developing the habits of critique and evaluation and reflection on one’s process.

What’s valuable? Market competition provides one kind of answer. Competitions offer another. On one side, competition is an ongoing and seemingly endless process of pricings; on the other, competitions are discrete and bounded in time and location, with entry rules, judges, scores, and prizes. This book examines what happens when ever more activities in domains of everyday life are evaluated and experienced in terms of performance metrics. Unlike organized competitions, such systems are ceaseless and without formal entry. Instead of producing resolutions, their scorings create addictions. To understand these developments, this book explores discrete contests (architectural competitions, international music competitions, and world press photo competitions); shows how the continuous updating of rankings is both a device for navigating the social world and an engine of anxiety; and examines the production of such anxiety in settings ranging from the pedagogy of performance in business schools to struggling musicians coping with new performance metrics in online platforms. In the performance society, networks of observation—in which all are performing and keeping score—are entangled with a system of emotionally charged preoccupations with one’s positioning within the rankings. From the bedroom to the boardroom, pharmaceutical companies and management consultants promise enhanced performance. This assemblage of metrics, networks, and their attendant emotional pathologies is herein regarded as the performance complex.

The anonymous Beglückte Verbundtnüß des Adels mit der Tugend (The happy union of nobility with virtue) is a Sittenspiel (moral or morality play) with music. The score, preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, was probably presented to members of the imperial family when they attended performances of the entertainment at the Augustinian convent of St. Laurenz in Vienna in August 1688. Beglückte Verbundtnüß was performed by the convent-school girls; its attractive music is suited to the skills of the young performers and the limited resources of the convent. The work illuminates the musical life and educational practices of one of Vienna's most prominent educational institutions for girls in the early modern era and links this city with the widespread use of music and drama in female education in the late seventeenth century.

A review of undergraduate course offerings at top-ranked colleges and universities in the United States and analysis of course syllabi from undergraduate programs in political science have revealed certain trends in the teaching post-communist politics. For instance, majority of schools now offer post-communist politics courses, although a student at a national university is more likely than one at a liberal arts institution to have the opportunity to learn about the region. Regardless of the type of school, students will most commonly study post-communism from a comparative, rather than international relations, perspective. Comparative courses usually focus on Russia and East Central Europe. Undergraduates curious about why a course on Russian politics matters will most often find syllabi that present the course as an examination of one of the most “dramatic political events of the twentieth century.” The examination of political change and continuing instability or chaos in Russian politics is another common theme. A few syllabi structure the course around theoretical concerns of the discipline and practical policy questions, framing the semester as a study of the quality and scope of democracy in Russia since the end of communism. East Central European (ECE) politics courses encompass multiple states, which creates opportunities and challenges not present in teaching Russian politics. Undergraduates are most likely introduced to East Central Europe through a thematic study of the entire region rather than extensive, individual country case studies.

This chapter chronicles the first public performances by dancers from the School of American Ballet in 1934. Although these performances have been construed as previews prior to the company’s official debut in 1935, both were important milestones in the life of the organization. The June 1934 performance at Woodlands, the family estate of Edward Warburg, was a somewhat makeshift affair and revealed the haphazard management of the enterprise. It offered not only the first public performances of Serenade but revised versions of two of Balanchine’s existing ballets, Dreams and Mozartiana. A second more public engagement in Hartford in December 1934 witnessed the premieres of two additional works, Transcendence and the collegiate satire Alma Mater (with a score by Kay Swift). These early offerings of the American Ballet met with mixed reactions and criticism as they were not geared to a wide audience and were not overtly American in character.

This chapter states the objectives and scope of the present book, and the historical and scholarly context in which it has been written. In the early twenty-first century a flood of books and newspaper articles declared the existence of a ‘God Gap’ between a more ‘religious’ United States and a more ‘secular’ Europe, reflected in politics, as well as in wider cultural differences. American/European differences also became a major issue in the debates between rival schools in the sociology of religion. The chapter outlines the evidence for the alleged ‘Gap’, the explanations offered by sociologists and historians, and the long tradition of writing on ‘American exceptionalism’. It concludes with a summary of the themes to be addressed in the book and the main arguments advanced by the authors.

This chapter examines the resurrection of William Jennings Bryan's rhetoric in the twenty-first century, one in Kansas and the other in a small town in Pennsylvania, as creationists continued to appeal to individual rights and democratic principles. One side fumed for science and against theocracy. The other side railed about the assault on religion and bemoaned the abandonment of sacred traditions. In both cases, two worldviews are evidently in conflict. This chapter begins with an overview of the controversy involving the State Board of Education in Kansas, which adopted science standards in 2005 that treated evolution as a flawed theory. It then considers the case in Dover involving the American Civil Liberties Union and how it brought intelligent design to “the center of legislative debates in more than a dozen states.” It shows that the Dover trial was proof that, over the years since Scopes, creationism had moved from a faith-based argument to one that claimed to be empirically grounded and an argument not about religion in schools but about individual rights and fairness.

This handbook seeks to present a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of social justice in music education. Contributors from around the world interrogate the complex, multidimensional, and often contested nature of social justice and music education from a variety of philosophical, political, social, and cultural perspectives. Although many chapters take as their starting point an analysis of how dominant political, educational, and musical ideologies serve to construct and sustain inequities and undemocratic practices, authors also identify practices that seek to promote socially just pedagogy and approaches to music education. These range from those taking place in formal and informal music education contexts, including schools and community settings, to music projects undertaken in sites of repression and conflict, such as prisons, refugee camps, and areas of acute social disadvantage or political oppression. In a volume of this scope, there are inevitably many recurring themes. However, common to many of those music education practices that seek to create more democratic and equitable spaces for musical learning is a belief in the centrality of student agency and a commitment to the too-often silenced voice of the learner. To that end, this Handbook challenges music educators to reflect critically on their own beliefs and pedagogical practices so that they may contribute more effectively to the creation and maintenance of music learning environs and programs in which matters of access and equity are continually brought to the fore.

The use of mathematics in medicine is not as widespread as it might be. While professional engineers are instructed in a wide variety of mathematical techniques during their training in preparation for their daily practice, tradition and the demands of other subjects mean that doctors give little attention to numerical matters in their education. A smattering of statistical concepts is typically the main mathematical field that we apply to medicine. The concept of the mathematical model is important and indeed familiar; personal finance, route planning, home decorating, and domestic projects all require the application of the basic mathematical tools we acquire at school. This utility is why we learn them. The insight that can be gained by applying mathematics to physiological and other problems within medical practice is, however, underexploited. The undoubted complexity of human biology and pathology perhaps leads us to give up too soon. There are useful and practical lessons that can be learned from the use of elementary mathematics in medicine. Anaesthetic training in particular lends itself to such learning with its emphasis on physics and clinical measurement. Much can be achieved with simple linear functions and hyperbolas. Further exploration into exponential and sinusoidal functions, although a little more challenging, is well within our scope and enables us to cope with many time-dependent and oscillatory phenomena that are important in clinical anaesthetic practice. Some fundamental physiological relationships are explained in this chapter using elementary mathematical functions. Building further on the foundation of simple models to cope with more complexity enables us to see the process, examine the predictions, and, most importantly, assess the plausibility of these models in practice. Understanding the structure of the model enables intelligent interpretation of its output. Some may be inspired to investigate some of the mathematical concepts and their applications further. The rewards can be intellectually, aesthetically, and practically fruitful. The subtle, revelatory, and quite beautiful connection between exponential and trigonometric functions through the concept of complex numbers is one example. That this connection has widespread practical importance too is most pleasing.

This is an account of John Ashbery’s career in which, as he puts it in ‘Grand Galop’, the ‘minor eras / Take on an importance all out of proportion to the story’.1 The ‘minority’ of any part of any story is, of course, a relational status always open to dispute, but in the available narratives of Ashbery’s life and work his personal and textual engagements with contemporaneous English poets have, up to this point, occupied a certifiably marginal position. This is unsurprising. When compared with the most ambitious, compelling narratives of Ashbery’s place within literary history—portraying him as a late Romantic, a Francophile avant-gardist, or a coterie poet of the New York School, among many other possible identities—concentrating on his English connections might seem a limited perspective from which to view his work. Yet because the idea of ‘minority’ was a central preoccupation for Ashbery throughout his career, it is apt to discover that many of the important, enduring points of interest which occupied his poetry and poetics—the relation of the margin to the centre, the ways in which art represents the historical moment of its composition, the processes by which canons are formed, the methods through which aesthetic ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ are determined, the connection between national identities and traditions and individual poetic expression—are foregrounded and illuminated when raised within such a ‘minor’ context. The limitation of scope in this study—which attends to Ashbery’s relationships with W. H. Auden, F. T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford—allows for a localized, concentrated sample of his writing to be attended to, and obliquely to substantiate or complicate our understanding of more general themes or practices in his oeuvre. Ashbery’s body of work is broad and varied enough to justify its fragmentation into specific sub-categories, which in combination will allow for a larger, more comprehensive and more complex picture of this inexhaustible poet to be presented. This book hopes to make three central contributions to that broader picture: to demonstrate the significance of Anglo-American contexts to Ashbery’s work, to illustrate his importance ...