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
An academic's murky, meandering, and tedious case for the arguable proposition that America's learned professions should pay more systematic attention to the common weal. While Sullivan (Philosophy and Sociology/LaSalle Univ.; coauthor, Habits of the Heart, 1985) tends to avoid specifying precisely which professions he's talking about at any given time, his bromidic ruminations appear to apply mainly to architects, attorneys, and physicians—i.e., callings that require specialized training in fields of codified knowledge. When it suits the author's relentlessly progressive purposes, however, he does not shrink from including administrators, bankers, the clergy, corporate executives, educators, journalists, social scientists, and other high-profile targets in the ranks of those whose shortcomings have, in his view, undermined the public's faith in expert elites. Sullivan tracks the development of a professional class in the egalitarian US from colonial times to today when, he charges, careerism has not only devalued vocational ethics but also made practitioners derelict in their duty to serve the public. He offers constant reminders of the unfulfilled pro bono obligations he believes professionals must undertake in light of the challenges that an increasingly interdependent global society poses for genuinely democratic capitalism. Having taken the professions to task, the author calls on them to engage in thoroughgoing renewal programs that could enhance their accountability and responsibility to communities broader than peer groups. In doing so, unfortunately, he eschews even a modicum of anecdotal evidence in favor of drab critiques or restatements of perspectives borrowed from his intellectual betters: Derek Bok (The Price of Talent); Barbara Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling); and William H. Whyte Jr. (The Organization Man), among others. Sullivan also exhibits an irksome penchant for loosely defined terms, from ``civic virtue'' to ``existential cooperation.'' A do-better lecture from an ivory-tower tenant, marred his inability to analyze, let alone explain, the ideals he professes and the institutions he challenges.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88730-727-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
A decade and a half ago, in America Revised, Frances FitzGerald demonstrated that widely used school textbooks presented simplistic, fatuous, and often inaccurate versions of American history. Here, Loewen (Sociology/Univ. of Vermont; Mississippi: Conflict and Change, not reviewed) draws the conclusion that little has changed since then. In a year-long study at the Smithsonian Institution, Loewen reviewed 12 leading high school history textbooks and was appalled by the unscholarly, inaccurate, and overtly ideological material he found. Textbooks, Loewen argues, ``supply irrelevant and erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their treatments of issues ranging from Columbus's second voyage to the possibility of impending ecocide.'' He notes their non-treatment of subjects such as early American settlers' relations with the Indians, Helen Keller's radical socialism (textbooks often present her story only as an inspirational one), Abraham Lincoln's complex attitudes about race, and American atrocities in Vietnam. Loewen contends that American history has traditionally been taught in order to inculcate patriotism and other moral qualities rather than to get at the truth. Moreover, he asserts, the discipline of history, more than other scholarly fields, has traditionally been dominated by upper-class white male writers who share a particular consensus on American history. While the discipline of history has become more sophisticated and diverse in recent decades, Loewen shows, school history textbooks have not kept up. The result is a general lack of interest in history on the part of intelligent students. Loewen concludes that high school history teachers can do much to enhance interest in history by questioning the texts, encouraging students to do primary source work, and continually asking questions rather than providing answers. Although Loewen often is entertaining, he presents both an indictment that rings true and an eloquent call to action. (40 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-100-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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