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First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Parents and community activists around the country complain that the education system is failing our children. They point to students' failure to master basic skills, even as standardized testing is widely employed in efforts to improve the educational system. Contradictions of Reform is a provocative look into the reality, for students as well as teachers, of standardized testing. A detailed account of how student improvement and teacher effectiveness are evaluated, Contradictions of Reform argues compellingly that the preparation of students for standardized tests engenders teaching methods that vastly compromise the quality of education.
McNeil traces the poor quality of high school instruction t the tensions between the social control purposes of schooling and the schools' educational goals.
"This seminal work . . . establishes a persuasive new paradigm."--Contemporary Sociology No book since Schooling in Capitalist America has taken on the systemic forces hard at work undermining our education system. This classic reprint is an invaluable resource for radical educators. Samuel Bowles is research professor and director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute, and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts. Herbert Gintis is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts.
Written by a parent and school board member, who first embraced many of the ideas of the modern school reform movement, Schoolhouse Shams lays bare much of the mythology and misinformation that underpin many of the failed school reform policies of the last decade. Many of the top strategies of the highly publicized school reform movement already have been tried out in St. Louis with disastrous results. Along with demonstrating the failure of school reform prescriptions to improve education, the experience of St. Louis demonstrates that the ideological premise of the reform movement, that a focus on providing opportunities for private profit-taking will necessarily improve schools, is both wrong and conflicts with the ideals of democracy, accountability, and justice.
What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children—but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way “this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.” Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult. At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes—to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own. Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.
In The School Reform Landscape: Fear, Mythologies, and Lies, the authors take an in-depth and controversial look at school reform since the launch of Sputnik. They scrutinize school reform events, proposals, and policies from the last 60 years through the lens of critical social theory and examine the ongoing tensions between the need to keep a vibrant unitary system of public education and the ongoing assault by corporate and elite interests in creating a dual system. Some of events, proposals, and policies critiqued include the Sputnik myth, A Nation At Risk, No Child Left Behind, the lies of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, and other common reform schemes. The authors provide an evidence-based contrarian view of the free-market reform ideas and pierce the veil of the new reform policies to find that they are built not upon empirical evidence, but instead rest solidly on foundations of myth, fear, and lies. Ideas for a new set of reform policies, based on empirical evidence and supportive of a unitary, democratic system of education are presented.
This book examines the joint effort of twentieth-century public schoool administrators and private philanthropy to initiate reforms to provide for children with learning difficulties. The author explores the development of these reforms from the establishment of special classes for backward children at the beginning of the century to the creation of programs for learning disabled children. He considers what this history tells us about current efforts to provide for at-risk students. He looks at both the way school administrators conceptualized childhood learning difficulties and the institutional arrangements which they introduced to accommodate these students, and pays particular attention to the preference of school administrators throughout this century for accommodating low achieving children in segregated classes and programs.
The systems that make up the accountability package in education: standards, assessments, and the quality determination for a school, have each entered the educational field under the explicit assumption by their creators that they would drive educator behavior in a positive way. But what if that isn’t actually the case? What if each of the components was actually designed for another purpose entirely and now is tasked with a role that was never considered in its design? If that is the case those who put the systems in place risk expecting a result that the system was never designed to produce. That is exactly where we find ourselves today. In education the misalignment between what the systems were designed to do and the intent of those who selected them is masked in the sheer complexity of the educational exercise. What this book does so marvelously is unravel that complexity and present the contradictions in a clear, coherent manner. Understanding these contradictions is the first step towards actual improvement.
In the midst of the continuing controversy over the right ways to bring change to American schools, Peter Temes’s book is a firebell in the night. In Against School Reform Mr. Temes sets out a straightforward prescription for our schools which centers on the life of the individual teacher and rejects the billion-dollar school reform industry. He argues that enormous monies and millions of hours of effort have gone into reforming American schools in the past ten years, and we have precious little to show for it. As we enter a critical period in American history—a growing population, an uncompromising demand for well-educated workers, and the complexities of world politics impacting ordinary people every day—there is not more time or money to waste. In Mr. Temes’s view, great teachers are the secret to making better schools. Forget the macro issues of school reform, he advises, and focus on recruiting, retaining, and supporting the very best teachers. Teaching will once again become an elite profession, and school problems will go the way of the trolley car. Against School Reform digs deep into the qualities of great teaching, with stories from real schools and with practical advice for parents, teachers, and students who want to celebrate and support great teachers. It also takes a serious look at what our schools must do to recruit and reward the best teachers in the coming era of teacher shortages. Finally, the book celebrates the power of individual teachers to make a difference in their schools and communities, as forces for bottom-up change. More tests won’t fix our schools, Mr. Temes writes. Bigger, better ideas about education won't fix things either. But great teachers can fix our schools, one classroom at a time.