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The Allure of Order - High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (Paperback)
Loot Price: R849
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The Allure of Order - High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (Paperback)
Series: Studies in Postwar American Political Development
Expected to ship within 18 - 22 working days
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Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind
the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was
hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make
the states set high standards, measure student progress, and hold
failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been
repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we
should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach
to school reform that Americans have tried before. In The Allure of
Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public
education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this
elusive goal. Not once, not twice, but three separate times-in the
Progressive Era, the 1960s and '70s, and NCLB-reformers have hit
upon the same idea for remaking schools. Over and over again,
outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific
management and have attempted to apply principles of rational
administration from above. Each of these movements started with
high hopes and ambitious promises, but each gradually discovered
that schooling is not easy to "order" from afar: policymakers are
too far from schools to know what they need; teachers are resistant
to top-down mandates; and the practice of good teaching is too
complex for simple external standardization. The larger problem,
Mehta argues, is that reformers have it backwards: they are trying
to do on the back-end, through external accountability, what they
should have done on the front-end: build a strong, skilled and
expert profession. Our current pattern is to draw less than our
most talented people into teaching, equip them with little relevant
knowledge, train them minimally, put them in a weak welfare state,
and then hold them accountable when they predictably do not achieve
what we seek. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach
which characterizes top-performing educational nations: attract
strong candidates into teaching, develop relevant and usable
knowledge, train teachers extensively in that knowledge, and
support these efforts through a strong welfare state. The Allure of
Order boldly challenges conventional wisdom with a sweeping,
empirically rich account of the last century of education reform,
and offers a new path forward for the century to come.
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