Following up his narrative of his rural Missouri childhood in Mid-Lands (1992), Davis (English/Univ. of Oklahoma) modestly offers a memoir of his middle-of-the-road, middlebrow, 1950s Kansas City college career. If a middle-class education (i.e., Ivy League) is ``supposed to help you maintain status so that your family can understand what you are saying,'' a lower-middle-class education is, according to Davis, ``supposed to help you improve your status so that your family will not understand what you are saying.'' Many of Davis's generation were the first in their families to leave home to attend college, and although this was not quite the case with Davis, he did arrive at the Jesuit-run Rockhurst College as a slightly bookish farmboy with an unexpungeable accent. Revisiting his college records and papers, Davis is abashed to discover a recruiting letter that boasted of a student body of ``average Joes scholastically'' and a prospectus that rhetorically asked, ``Does training by men and with men mean more to you?'' Davis finds his youthful self equally obtuse, not to mention naive politically, romantically, and intellectually. An undistinguished face in his class picture, his student-self is portrayed, with some lenience and affection, as semiconscious of the Korean War, oblivious to the Eisenhower recession, emotionally untutored with his first sweetheart, and in general too busy with intramural sports, the college paper, and ``barracks'' life to acquire a genuine education. While Davis writes with rueful clarity about life in a small midwestern college in the 1950s, he frequently strikes chords that transcend time and place. In contrast to recent let-it-all-hang-out autobiographies from academics, such as Frank Lentricchia's The Edge of Night (1994), Davis's personal memoir of the Silent Generation's college years stirs up nostalgia with low-key irony. (14 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8061-2848-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
A bountifully self-serving account by Sperling, CEO of the Apollo Group, the NASDAQ-listed parent company of the University of Phoenix, about how he came to found an education company with revenues of over $500 million and capitalization of $3 billion. In the 1960s, Sperling, campus radical and economic historian at San Jose State, developed a course for local teachers and police officers designed to help them reduce juvenile delinquency in their neighborhoods. Sperling, who had been poor as a child, was committed to helping others improve their lot through education. Noticing that adults did not have good access to higher education, he was inspired to start a company that would provide an educational “product” that was appropriate and convenient for adults. Attacked for creating “diploma mills,” Sperling became embroiled in a war with the educational establishment, which he describes as “largely proxies for cultural battles between defenders of 800 years of educational (largely religious) tradition, and an innovation that was based on the values of the marketplace—transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability.” Unfortunately, Sperling barely articulates either his opponents’ criticisms (choosing instead to characterize them as elitists intent on protecting middle-class privilege) or any details about the courses and degree programs his company offers. Readers may be left guessing what the “new model” for adult education is all about—and wondering why Sperling, who benefited from an elite education himself (Cambridge, UC Berkeley), does not recommend the same nostrum for all underprivileged students. Perhaps he believes that Wall Street investors, who now own his company, have little interest in academic debates. Yet by omitting any substantive arguments, Sperling has missed an opportunity to tell the world how his programs succeed, not only in providing a profitable form of education, but in providing a better education, or indeed one half so good, as the models he disdains. A lamentably failed apologia for for-profit education.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-471-32604-6
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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
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