The official evaluator of the country’s first private-school voucher program reports on his provocative but often inconclusive findings. Proposed more than a generation ago by Milton Friedman as market-based and therefore efficient, the voucher approach to public education has taken a while to become a hot public-policy issue. Conflicting values—freedom of choice versus equality of opportunity—are engaged. Voucher funding is frequently made problematic by First Amendment barriers and local politics. Witte (Political Science and Public Affairs/Univ. of Wisconsin) has monitored the program that made Milwaukee famous in educational circles since the early ’90s, when that city instituted its system of school choice, bringing all its political currents bubbling to the surface. In studied professorial tones and with weighty statistics, Witte discusses Milwaukee’s statutory constraints, inner-city’school problems, voucher costs, and constitutional limits. He cautiously concludes that choice can be useful in poor inner-city communities. But, he adds, if choice extends beyond such sites, the poor will once again be disfavored. Inner-city private schools must be rigorously evaluated; they are not a universal panacea. Witte finds that the Milwaukee program had mixed, yet generally positive, effects on the private schools that participated. There were also positive results for parents. Student outcomes were harder to assess; achievement tests seemed to prove nothing in particular. Applauding the decision to target the program using income and geographic parameters, Witte expresses his preference for targeted systems over universal voucher programs, though he declines to generalize about wider market approaches. Whether local politics clouded the issues or sharply defined answers and clear prescriptions were beyond the scope of this report, the text seems, despite its technical approach and professional style, to carry a strong whiff of frustration, even discouragement. Less a polemic than a tool to foster closer consideration of an idea whose time may or may not have come. (Tables, maps, and charts throughout)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-691-00944-9
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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