A compelling, instructive account regarding education in America, where the arguments have become “so nasty, provincial, and...
Chronicle of a journalist’s global travels to visit schools, interviewing educators and talking with students and their families in order to answer the question, “Why were some kids learning so much—and others so very little?”
Ripley (The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, 2008) examines why there is a disparity in performance on tests of mathematical and scientific competence between American students and their global counterparts, even when factors such as poverty and discrimination are taken into account. She explains that America's poor showing translates into lost jobs for Americans, who cannot compete with foreign labor even in semiskilled jobs. Many of the arguments about American education fail to address the real issues behind the competitive failure of American schools compared to Finnish and South Korean schools (where students are in the top tier on international tests), as well as Poland, where the rate of improvement is remarkable. Ripley builds her narrative around the experience of three American teenagers, each of whom spent a year abroad as exchange students—in Finland, South Korea and Poland, respectively. The author describes a political consensus in each of the three countries that nearly guarantees the creation and maintenance of a highly educated workforce, from top to bottom. The importance of education is a reflection of national consensus on the respect for teachers. A large portion of their education budgets go to teachers’ salaries, and the instructors are chosen from the top third of their graduating classes and must meet high professional standards on a par with engineers. Per capita, America spends more money on education, but the money is allocated differently—e.g., to sports teams and programs that provide students with laptops, iPads and interactive whiteboards.
A compelling, instructive account regarding education in America, where the arguments have become “so nasty, provincial, and redundant that they no longer lead anywhere worth going."Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5442-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A faulty diagnosis of what ails our schools, and an account of one woman's inconclusive attempt to cure them. Unlike many other proponents of educational reform, Wallace, former superintendent of the Vance County school district in North Carolina, and Graves, a reporter for the Oregonian, identify the bell curve as the major culprit in our educational woes. This statistical tool, they say, fails to accurately describe phenomena controlled by human will, such as achievement in school. The authors feel that schools' reliance on on this faulty measure results in lower standards, since we strive towards the middle, rather than the top, of the curve: textbooks are homogenized and lifeless because they are geared to the average reading ability of each grade; and since the curve presupposes the inability of certain students to achieve the average, these children are tracked early on into basic-level courses. But Wallace and Graves have merely set up a straw man. Standards are low, but the bell curve only describes that, it doesn't cause it. Textbooks are dull, but unnecessasrily so—even writing geared to the curve's center can be lively. And students who are tracked into basic classes are generally not challenged because teachers' reduced expectations cause them to give up on these kids altogether. Most of the book is devoted to Wallace's experience in Vance County, a poor and underachieving school district where Wallace was allowed to try her reforms. She disposed of grade levels and grading and allowed students to progress at their own pace. (Innovative schools such as the Paint Branch Elementary School in Maryland have had success with this more fluid system.) Unfortunately, Wallace only stayed a couple of years because of political infighting (described at length). She claims small successes—measured, ironically, against the reviled curve—but it is impossible to determine success or failure of an educational reform program in such a short time. Simplistic and self-congratulatory.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11876-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
A curious hybrid: part history of the American university during the Cold War years, part memoir of the elder (Jacob) Neusner's five decades as perhaps America's leading Judaica scholar. Neither part works. Neusner Sr. is the hyperprolific author of hundreds of works on the nature and evolution of talmudic Judaism; son Noam is a reporter for the Tampa Tribune; together, they provide a brief and rather superficial history of the postWW II American university that is informed by a distinctly neoconservative bias: Recently, faculties supposedly have become radicalized; teachers pander to student wishes, curricula are standardless and rigidly politically correct; students are pampered and left intellectually unchallenged. At times, their tone deteriorates into Rush Limbaughlike rhetoric, such as a reference to academic ``fascist feminism.'' Meanwhile, in describing a supposedly pre-'60s ``golden age'' of academia, the Neusners somehow forget to mention the influence of McCarthyism or the CIA's efforts to infiltrate campus faculty. The memoir sections are no better. While Jacob Neusner has some interesting things to say about his own pedagogic ideals, particularly the desirability and necessity of balancing good teaching with good scholarship, his tone often is grandiose, as if he were the only one doing important work in Jewish studies. He writes about numerous colleagues with transparent contempt (about named and unnamed ``scholars of Judaism'' at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he claims, ``They confused their opinions with facts, cultivated obscurity, and practiced obfuscation''). At the end of his career, isolated after almost three decades at Brown University (he is now at the Univ. of South Florida) in part because of his abrasive personal and rhetorical style, Neusner sounds kvetchy, self-pitying, and bitter; one of his chapter subheadings reads ``A Career Concludes, The Ostracism Continues.'' Poor Jacob Neusner, poor readerthis is dreary stuff from an admirably productive, often insightful scholar.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8264-0853-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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