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AFTER THE EDUCATION WARS

Name: AFTER THE EDUCATION WARS
Author: Andrea Gabor
ISBN: 978-1-62097-199-4

HOW SMART SCHOOLS UPEND THE BUSINESS OF REFORM

by Andrea Gabor ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 2018

A vigorous study of how school reform requires vigilance, collaboration, and a capacious definition of true learning.

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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

Categories:

EDUCATION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CAPITALIST PHILOSOPHERS
by Andrea Gabor

- BOOK REVIEW
EINSTEIN'S WIFE
by Andrea Gabor

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GONE FOR GOOD

TALES OF UNIVERSITY LIFE AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE

by Stuart Rojstaczer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999

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A serious, although informal, introduction to the realities of the university world today. A scientist who writes about a university is about as rare as a duck in a tree. Most recent reflections on changes in the academic world have come from humanists and social scientists—and most of them have been disgruntled, many bitter. Rojstaczer, a geologist and environmental engineer (Duke), shares their concerns but, by contrast, is refreshingly balanced and calm. His chatty style never betrays anger or despair. He humanizes his subject where others have often parodied it. He recognizes that a brief postwar “golden age,” perhaps a third of a century long, in universities’ wealth, confidence, and freedom from accountability is forever gone. He doesn’t like many qualities of today’s research institutions: grade inflation, a reduction in course loads and requirements for the major, students who won’t work hard, universities’ failure to live within their means, the corruption of athletic programs, the dependence upon fund-raising, and the difficulties of attracting graduate students and getting research grants. But who does like them? If his concerns about intellectual fashions, faculty politics, and lazy students are scarcely unique, what is distinctive is Rojstaczer’s refusal to succumb to nostalgia and his recognition that today’s universities face realities that didn’t exist in the 1960s. Yet his book would have been improved by more extended reflections about what has in fact improved in American higher education since the 1960s—its greater diversity of students, faculty members, and concerns, and its greater openness to ideas chief among them—even if these improvements have exacted their costs. An anecdotal yet insightful tour of American universities by an insider.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-19-512682-3

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999

Categories:

EDUCATION

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THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE

MOVING BEYOND TRADITIONAL CLASSROOMS AND ``TOUGHER STANDARDS''

by Alfie Kohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1999

Though Kohn’s zeal for reform is undeniable, in this book he seems content to preach to the progressive choir rather than...

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Another blistering critique (after Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, 1993) of traditional public schooling by a progressive who displays the same intellectual rigidity he abhors in others.

In pithy, take-no-prisoners prose, Kohn mounts a frontal assault on what he calls the “Old School,” where teachers rely on lectures, textbooks, worksheets, and grades to “transmit” a series of isolated facts and skills to their students. Rebutting those who believe that education should get “back to basics,” Kohn makes a persuasive case that the majority of schools never left them behind. The author also targets the “tougher standards” movement, arguing that a greater emphasis on standardized testing and other evaluations needlessly pits students against one another and ultimately leads to mediocrity. Since schools are already failing with this approach, why offer more of the same? Instead, Kohn, leaning heavily on John Dewey and Jean Piaget, proposes multiage, interdisciplinary classrooms where students work on projects and actively “construct” their own knowledge, teachers act as “facilitators,” and grades give way to performance-based evaluations. As presented here, however, Kohn’s solution is just another brand of educational orthodoxy, the progressive version of the one-size-fits-all that currently afflicts the public schools. Oddly, for someone who decries simplistic thinking, Kohn does quite a bit of it. At one point, he frames the education debate this way: those who seek “education for profit” vs. those who seek “education for democracy.” (Guess which side he’s on!) Worse, Kohn belittles everyone who doesn’t agree with him. E.D. Hirsch, of cultural literacy fame, for example, is dismissed as the father of the “bunch o’ facts” school. The harangue spills over into the book’s lengthy appendix, in which the author debunks all the research he doesn’t like, and even into the extensive footnotes, which endlessly recycle arguments made more effectively elsewhere.

Though Kohn’s zeal for reform is undeniable, in this book he seems content to preach to the progressive choir rather than persuade others to adopt his cause.