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The Allure of Order - High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (Hardcover)
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The Allure of Order - High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (Hardcover)
Series: Studies in Postwar American Political Development
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Worries about the quality of public schooling in America are not
new. Present since the mid-nineteenth century, the issue became a
perennial one after 1918, the year in which elementary school
attendance became compulsory in every state. The Allure of Order
traces the cyclical efforts to 'order' American schooling over the
course of the twentieth century, from 1920s reform efforts up
through No Child Left Behind and the current school accountability
movement. The book explores why reformers from both the left and
right have repeatedly placed such high hopes in these reforms and
why teachers and schools have been unable to resist these external
reformers. As he shows, the measurable has repeatedly crowded out
the educationally meaningful, and reforms have never realized the
hopes placed in them. In each reform effort, higher-status
professionals have drawn from policies outside the educational
arena and ridden roughshod over the teaching profession, which has
remained, as he puts it, under-professionalized. Outside reformers
looked to fix schools using Taylorist principles in the 1920s,
Department of Defense metrics in the 1960s, and maxims from
management gurus in our own era. In each case, a largely male
administrative elite dictated to a largely feminized teaching
profession that had little say over policy. In fact, the whole
American educational sector was put together backwards: we draw
less than our most able people to teaching, underprofessionalize
the field, equip teachers with a weak knowledge base, put them in a
highly challenging situation because of a comparatively weak
welfare state, and then, when they don't achieve the results we
seek, impose increasingly stringent regimes of external
accountability. Mehta proposes that we do the reverse: draw more
talented people into teaching, train them well, support their
efforts through a more robust welfare state, and stimulate a cycle
of increased trust and lessening control. This is the strategy of a
number of the countries that outpace the United States on
international assessments, and it is essentially the opposite of
America's preferred strategy. Empirically rich and sweeping in
scope, The Allure of Order will force anyone who cares about
educational policy to re-examine his or her fundamental beliefs
about the problems plaguing our schools.
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