A readable and engaging array of journal entries and essays by a New York City school principal who created a successful alternative public school program. Twenty-one years ago, Deborah Meier started the first Central Park East elementary school in Harlem's district 4, an area with a predominantly African-American and Latino student body that had the lowest test scores of any of the city's 32 districts. With a small group of teachers, CPE (as the school became known) was able to create a strong nonbureaucratic school culture that involved parents and adapted to children's needs. Ten years later, one school became three and a plan for a CPE high school was hatched. The high school proved to be more controversial, largely because, in New York, elementary schools are given much more leeway than high schools, which are subject to a great deal of city and state requirements. Taking a cue from the Oxford standard of education, Meier and her colleagues implemented a performance- or portfolio- based graduation, requiring students to prepare papers and projects in several major subjects rather than simply accumulating ``seat time'' or passing a multiple-choice test. Drawing on the work of Brown University educational authority Theodore Sizer, Meier explains that such a method of completion has ``a long and honorable tradition, including bar mitzvahs, Boy Scout rituals, Red Cross tests and doctoral committees.'' As Meier leads her tour of school reform, one realizes that her method of building schools has much in common with the entrepreneurial spirit that it takes to start a business. But she emphatically does not see this as a justification for privatizing schools. This is most clear in her discussion of school choice: ``While choice has been advocated by enemies of public education, I believe that in fact choice is an essential tool for saving public education.'' A compelling and passionate case, made by both example and argument, that meaningful school reform is a thoroughly public obligation.
Pub Date: April 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-3110-0
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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