An outside-the-box approach to meeting students’ needs gets a worthy and forceful advocate.
A reformer argues for changes to the special education system.
In this policy book, Hettleman (It’s the Classroom, Stupid, 2010) contends that the majority of students currently in special education programs are being shortchanged by a system that disregards the original intent of state and federal laws. The author asserts that they would be better served by “Response to Intervention,” a framework that combines early diagnosis of learning impairments with short-term additional instruction to students who remain in a standard classroom. Drawing on both research and personal experience as an advocate for pupils while serving on the Baltimore school board, Hettleman makes an impassioned argument (“the purgatory of general education or the hell of special education”) on behalf of the students he calls “Mainly Mislabeled”—to distinguish them from the “Truly Disabled.” The latter have severe cognitive disabilities and benefit from traditional special education. In this volume, the author lays out a cogent case for making changes to the system. Empirical studies are blended with anecdotes from Hettleman’s professional experience to present both a big picture view of the problem and specific instances of how the education system fails students, especially those at a socio-economic disadvantage. The author frequently reminds readers that his quarrel is with the educational establishment and bureaucracy, not with teachers as individuals. Some of his suggestions, like the elimination of local school boards (“The business of K-12 schooling is simply too complicated for very part-time volunteer policy-makers”), are fundamental challenges to the status quo. The book’s solutions include expanded and updated teacher training, centralized systems for curriculum development and instructional methods, and learning plans that include specific measurable goals for all students. In addition, Hettleman offers a cleareyed assessment of the political realities reformers face. The concluding chapters deliver useful guidance for parents advocating for their own children and for activists working on broader education reform. An extensive notes section provides both citations and further discussion. The work’s conversational tone and the author’s evident enthusiasm for the subject make it an easy read for those not well versed in education policy.
An outside-the-box approach to meeting students’ needs gets a worthy and forceful advocate.Pub Date: March 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63576-639-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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