My highlights from chapter 1 of Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform by David Tyack and Larry Cuban
Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002P6886A?ie=UTF8&ref_=r_soa_w_dMy Notes Link: https://kindle.amazon.com/work/tinkering-toward-utopia-century-ebook/B000B3CFHM/B002P6886A
Change where it counts the most-in the daily interactions of teachers and students-is the hardest to achieve and the most important, but we are not pessimistic about improving the public schools.Read more at location 123
Basic to their conception of educational science was a conviction that children had different abilities, interests, and destinies in life. hence schools should treat them differently; this was their concept of equality of educational opportunity. They gave different labels to students who did not fit their definition of "normal," and they created tracks and niches for them. Progress to these experts meant a place for every child and every child in his or her place.27 Read more at location 238
President Lyndon Johnson declared that proper schooling could prevent poverty, not merely ameliorate the lives of the poor, echoing a claim made by Horace Mann more then a century before.Read more at location 336
Although Johnson's War on Poverty relied heavily on schools as an agent of reform, actual redistribution of educational resources lagged far behind need, for "savage inequalities" persisted, particularly in urban and rural schools that enrolled the poor and people of color.Read more at location 345
Parents who have children in public schools tend to rate public education much more highly than the average respondent, and those polled have a higher opinion of local schools than they do of schools in general. Parents give high ratings to the particular schools their children attend.Read more at location 391
Because nonparents rate schools significantly lower than parents do, changing demographics help to explain why the public ratings of schools dropped so precipitously between 1974 and 1983.Read more at location 399
When teachers were asked why they became dissatisfied and left the profession, their top two grievances were "public attitudes toward schools" and "treatment of education by the media."Read more at location 412
The historian Lawrence A. Cremin questions the assertion that bad schools are responsible for a deteriorating economy: "to contend that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform ... is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools." WeRead more at location 427
David C. Berliner, an educational psychologist, argues that "the public school system of the United States has actually done remarkably well as it receives, instructs, and nurtures children who are poor, without health care, and from families and neighborhoods that barely function." For all their defects, schools may still be the most positive influence many children encounter, given the turbulence and dysfunction in many impoverished neighborhoods.Read more at location 479
The public schools, for all their faults, remain one of our most stable and effective public institutions-indeed, given the increase in social pathologies in the society, educators have done far better in the last generation than might have been expected.Read more at location 492
The key problem is to devise plausible policies for improvement of schooling that can command the support of a worried public and the commitment of the educators upon whom reform must rely.85 Read more at location 509
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