A bittersweet tale of dreams unrealized.
Former public school teacher and journalist Schorr gives a grim report of two California charter schools he observed for three years following their inception.
Oakland parents weren’t asking for much: they wanted their children to get a decent education in their neighborhood public schools. Exasperated by the local school board’s hostility to reform, a coalition of parents and churches known as the OCO proposed a charter school (an independent public school exempt from bureaucracy and mandated to get results or be shut down) in partnership with School Futures, a pro-voucher group financed with Wal-Mart money. In 1999, the Oakland Board of Education voted to approve five OCO-School Futures charters—for the school year beginning in less than five months. Three of the five schools never even reached the planning stages. The two that did open were beset with problems. Schorr carefully layers the views of teachers, parents, and students at the Dolores Huerta Learning Academy and the E.C. Reems Academy of Technology and Art (a facility with neither computers nor art classes). Both schools suffered most seriously from the fact that School Futures repeatedly hired unqualified principals without checking their credentials. E.C. Reems principal Laura Armstrong, a former fourth-grade teacher, had no experience as an administrator. Her lack of skills combined with a combative personality made her incapable of motivating her teachers, most of whom she recruited through word-of-mouth at the local beauty parlor. When Armstrong was fired, School Futures hired a man dismissed from previous posts because of charges of sexual harassment and misuse of funds. The principal of Dolores Huerta was also a poor choice: seemingly unstable and so sidetracked by minutiae like the color of the school floor tiles that she nearly failed to hire an adequate number of teachers. (She was also fired.) The children ultimately paid the price for this disaster: standardized tests showed only seven percent of E.C. Reems fourth-grade students reading at grade level.
A bittersweet tale of dreams unrealized.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44702-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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
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
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