THE PROBLEMS OF PUBLIC SCHOOLING
Book Reviews
Research & Analysis
Short Route to Chaos
Stephen Arons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
Read Andrew Coulson's review, and the author's response.
Read the Introduction and Table of Contents.
"According to Stephen Arons, American public schooling
has fallen on hard times. Presenting numerous examples and taking as his primary case in
point the Goals 2000 legislation fashioned by the Clinton and Bush administrations, Arons
examines how education policy can affect individual liberty and cultural diversity. Arons
is critical of both the "liberal" education establishment and the
"conservatives" allied with the Christian Right. He argues that unless
government agencies are prevented from controlling the content of schooling, school wars
will only escalate." --From the book jacket.
Public Education: An
Autopsy
Myron Lieberman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
"In this blistering critique
of our failing public schools and our fuzzy thinking about how to fix them, Myron
Lieberman explains why public education is in irreversible and terminal decline and tells
us what we must do to get American schooling back on track." --From the book jacket.
Journalistic Accounts
Shut Up and Let the
Lady Teach: A Teacher's Year in a Public School
Emily Sachar (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991).
This book "is a clear-eyed
and compassionate report from an urban battlefront: our inner-city schools. After years as
a prize-winning education reporter, Emily Sachar decided to encounter at first hand the
day-to-day realities of life in a troubled inner-city public school.... Emily Sachar
enters her homeroom to find that the teacher's desk is missing two legs. Elsewhere, the
students' wooden desktops are cracked in half or missing altogether. Classroom walls and
ceilings are covered with graffiti..." --From the book jacket.
Dumbing
Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or
Add
Charles Sykes (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).
"This book... documents the collapse of standards in our schools, the flight from learning, and the triumph of mediocre, feel-good education that is more concerned with pumping up self-esteem than it is with passing on knowledge." --From the book jacket.
Reclaiming Our Schools: The Struggle for Chicago School Reform
Maribeth Vander Weele (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994).
Formerly an investigative reporter with the Sun Times, Vander Weele is an expert on the pedagogical and criminal misconduct which plague Chicago's public schools. Reclaiming Our Schools takes the reader on a dystopian Alice-in-Wonderland adventure into one of the United States' largest government school bureaucracies.
Computers as
Tutors: Solving the Crisis in Education
By: Fred Bennett
This remarkable site offers an entire book on the public schools'
failure to make use of proven technological tools, and argues that these tools can, indeed
must, be brought into the schools.
The Grandfather Education Reform Report
By: Michael Hodges and Bill Mechlenburg
This information-packed site charts the decline in educational
productivity of public schools over the past several decades. It covers a broad range of
issues using both text and graphics to make its points.
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