A vigorous study of how school reform requires vigilance, collaboration, and a capacious definition of true learning.
Corporate reformers undermine public education.
Joining the debate about school reform that has erupted in recent books enthusiastically for and passionately against charter schools, the Common Core, and assessment by testing, Gabor (Chair, Business Journalism/Baruch Coll., CUNY; The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business—Their Lives, Times, and Ideas, 2000, etc.) mounts a strong argument for “a well-designed, collaborative, trust-based approach” to change. Citing reform efforts in Massachusetts, Texas, Louisiana, and New York, the author takes aim at charter schools and the “handful of wealthy, unelected, mostly out-of-town organizations and benefactors” who champion them. In New Orleans, an already troubled public school system responded to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina by turning to charter schools without ever engaging parents or teachers. Most charters, such as the much-touted Sci Academy, focused on test preparation and instituted a no-excuses policy that caused many students to be suspended or drop out; the charters were staffed largely by inexperienced teachers, trained “in highly regimented routines” designed to foster “order and security.” Gabor criticizes the Common Core for favoring easily assessed subjects such as math and grammar, forcing schools to minimize civics and literature, two subjects that she believes are essential in a democracy. Moreover, rating and funding schools through their students’ test scores has fomented corruption and cheating among administrators and teachers, whose jobs may be vulnerable to test outcomes. The “testing mania,” Gabor asserts, “has dumbed down education.” Among successful reform efforts, the author profiles Manhattan’s Julia Richman High School, which adopted a small-school strategy of four schools within a larger complex. Teachers had decisive input, and the school established a trusted relationship with the teachers union. Similarly, at Central Park East, “open-classroom pedagogy and democratic governance” resulted in success. In Brockton, Massachusetts, the city’s benighted high school was revived through the efforts of a strong local leader who marshaled widespread community cooperation. In 2016, Massachusetts defeated a ballot initiative to lift the cap on charter schools.
A vigorous study of how school reform requires vigilance, collaboration, and a capacious definition of true learning.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-199-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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