A groundbreaking analysis of how teachers actually teach and have taught in the past.   The quality and effectiveness of teaching are a constant subject of discussion within the profession and among the broader public. Most of that conversation focuses on the question of how teachers should teach. In The Enduring Classroom, veteran teacher and scholar of education Larry Cuban explores different questions, ones that just might be more important: How have teachers actually taught? How do they teach now? And what can we learn from both?   Examining both past and present is crucial, Cuban explains. If reformers want teachers to adopt new techniques, they need to understand what teachers are currently doing if they want to have any hope of having their innovations implemented. Cuban takes us into classrooms then and now, using observations from contemporary research as well as a rich historical archive of classroom accounts, along the way asking larger questions about teacher training and the individual motivations of people in the classroom. Do teachers freely choose how to teach, or are they driven by their beliefs and values about teaching and learning? What role do students play in determining how teachers teach? Do teachers teach as they were taught? By asking and answering these and other policy questions with the aid of concrete data about actual classroom practices, Cuban helps us make a crucial step toward creating reforms that could actually improve instruction.  

A groundbreaking analysis of how teachers actually teach and have taught in the past.   The quality and effectiveness of teaching are a constant subject of discussion within the profession and among the broader public. Most of that conversation focuses on the question of how teachers should teach. In The Enduring Classroom, veteran teacher and scholar of education Larry Cuban explores different questions, ones that just might be more important: How have teachers actually taught? How do they teach now? And what can we learn from both?   Examining both past and present is crucial, Cuban explains. If reformers want teachers to adopt new techniques, they need to understand what teachers are currently doing if they want to have any hope of having their innovations implemented. Cuban takes us into classrooms then and now, using observations from contemporary research as well as a rich historical archive of classroom accounts, along the way asking larger questions about teacher training and the individual motivations of people in the classroom. Do teachers freely choose how to teach, or are they driven by their beliefs and values about teaching and learning? What role do students play in determining how teachers teach? Do teachers teach as they were taught? By asking and answering these and other policy questions with the aid of concrete data about actual classroom practices, Cuban helps us make a crucial step toward creating reforms that could actually improve instruction.  

For almost two centuries, Americans expected that their public schools would cultivate the personal, moral, and social development of individual students, create citizens, and bind diverse groups into one nation. Since the 1980s, however, a new generation of school reformers has been intent on using schools to solve the nation's economic problems. An economic justification for public schools--equipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplace--overwhelmed other historically accepted purposes for tax-supported public schools.
Private sector management has become the model for public school systems as schools and districts are "downsized," "restructured," and "outsourced." Recent reform proposals have called for government-funded vouchers to send children to private schools, the creation of self-governing charter schools, the contracting of schools to private entrepreneurs, and the partnerships with the business community in promoting new information technologies. But if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only toward enhancing the country's economic success? Is everything public for sale? Are the interests of individuals or selected groups overwhelming the common good that the founders of tax-supported public schools so fervently sought?
This volume explores the ongoing debates about what constitutes the common good in American public education, assessing the long-standing tensions between shared purposes and individual interests in schooling. It shows how recent school reform efforts, driven by economic concerns, have worsened the conflict between the legitimate interests of individuals and society as a whole, and demonstrates that reconstructing the common good envisioned by the founders of public education in the United States remains essential and unfinished work.

Take an economically and racially diverse urban school district emerging from a long history of segregation. Add an energetic, capable, bridge-building superintendent with ambitious district-wide goals to improve graduation rates, school attendance, and academic performance. Consider that he was well funded and strongly supported by city leaders, teachers, and parents, and ask how much changed in a decade of his tenure and what remained unchanged?

Larry Cuban takes this richly detailed history of the Austin, Texas, school district, under Superintendent Pat Forgione, to ask the question that few politicians and school reformers want to touch. Given effective use of widely welcomed reforms, can school policies and practices put all children at the same academic level? Are class and ethnic differences in academic performance within the power of schools to change?

Cuban argues that the overall district has shown much improvement better test scores, more high school graduates, and more qualified teachers. But the improvements are unevenly distributed. The elementary schools improved, as did the high schools located in affluent, well-educated, largely white neighborhoods. But the least improvement came where it was needed most: the predominantly poor, black, and Latino high schools. Before Forgione arrived, over 10 percent of district schools were failing, and after he left office, roughly the same percentage continued to fail. Austin s signal successes amid failure hold answers to tough questions facing urban district leaders across the nation.

In this book, Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital technologies in K-12 classrooms, exploring if and how technology has transformed teaching and learning. In particular, he examines forty-one classrooms across six districts in Silicon Valley that have devoted special attention and resources to integrating digital technologies into their education practices. Cuban observed all of the classrooms and interviewed each of the teachers in an effort to answer several straightforward, if also elusive, questions: Has technology integration been fully implemented and put into practice in these classrooms, and has this integration and implementation resulted in altered teaching practices? Ultimately, Cuban asks if the use of digital technologies has resulted in transformed teaching and learning in these classrooms. The answers to these questions reflect Cuban's assessment not only of digital technologies and their uses, but of the complex interrelations of policy and practice, and of the many-often unintended-consequences of reforms and initiatives in the education world. Similarly, his answers reflect his subtle understanding of change and continuity in education practice, and of the varying ways in which different actors in the education world-policy makers, school leaders, teachers, and others- understand, and sometimes misinterpret, those changes. The result is a crucial contribution to our knowledge of digital technologies and their place in contemporary education practice from one of our leading scholars of education policy, practice, and reform.

For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices. In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to "reinvent" schooling? Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.

A book that explores the problematic connection between education policy and practice while pointing in the direction of a more fruitful relationship, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice is a provocative culminating statement from one of America's most insightful education scholars and leaders. Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice takes as its starting point a strikingly blunt question: ""With so many major structural changes in U.S. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices been largely stable, with a modest blending of new and old teaching practices, leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations of school-goers?"" It is a question that ought to be of paramount interest to all who are interested in school reform in the United States. It is also a question that comes naturally to Larry Cuban, whose much-admired books have focused on various aspects of school reform--their promises, wrong turns, partial successes, and troubling failures. In this book, he returns to this territory, but trains his focus on the still baffling fact that policy reforms--no matter how ambitious or determined--have generally had little effect on classroom conduct and practice. Cuban explores this problem from a variety of angles. Several chapters look at how teachers, in responding to major policy initiatives, persistently adopt changes and alter particular routine practices while leaving dominant ways of teaching largely undisturbed. Other chapters contrast recent changes in clinical medical practice with those in classroom teaching, comparing the practical effects of varying medical and education policies. The book's concluding chapter distils important insights from these various explorations, taking us inside the ""black box"" of the book's title: those workings that have repeatedly transformed dramatic policy initiatives into familiar--and largely unchanged--classroom practices.

Examines an innovative approach to school district management that has been adopted by a number of urban districts in recent years: a portfolio management model, in which ""a central office oversees a portfolio of schools offering diverse organisational and curricular themes, including traditional public schools, private organisations, and charter schools.

Cutting Through the Hype: The Essential Guide to School Reform is a revised, expanded, and updated version of the classic work by Jane L. David and Larry Cuban. It offers balanced analyses of 23 currently popular school reform strategies, from teacher performance pay and putting mayors in charge to turnaround schools and data-driven instruction. Avoiding the heated rhetoric and exaggerated claims that accompany many education reforms, each chapter explains clearly and concisely what each reform intends to do, what happens in reality, and what it takes to make it work. Written by two savvy and experienced educator-researchers, Cutting Through the Hype is a book for expert and nonexpert readers alike-policymakers, researchers, school leaders, teachers, and concerned citizens and parents-indeed, for all who are committed to schools and have a stake in their success.

Against the Odds offers an in-depth look at the Mapleton, Colorado, school district's transformation of two traditional high schools into seven small schools, each enrolling fewer than four hundred students. This even-handed account chronicles both the heartening successes and frequent frustrations of a district-wide embrace of the small school model.

"Ford Motor Company would not have survived the competition had it not been for an emphasis on results. We must view education the same way," the U.S. Secretary of Education declared in 2003. But is he right? In this provocative new book, Larry Cuban takes aim at the alluring cliche that schools should be more businesslike, and shows that in its long history in business-minded America, no one has shown that a business model can be successfully applied to education.

In this straight-talking book, one of the most distinguished scholars in education charts the Gilded Age beginnings of the influential view that American schools should be organized to meet the needs of American businesses, and run according to principles of cost-efficiency, bottom-line thinking, and customer satisfaction.

Not only are schools by their nature not businesslike, Cuban argues, but the attempt to run them along business lines leads to dangerous over-standardization--of tests, and of goals for our children. Why should we think that there is such a thing as one best school? Is "college for all" achievable--or even desirable? Even if it were possible, do we really want schools to operate as bootcamps for a workforce? Cuban suggests that the best business-inspired improvement for American education would be more consistent and sustained on-the-job worker training, tailored for the job to be done, and business leaders' encouragement--and adoption--of an ethic of civic engagement and public service.

Eminent historian and educator Larry Cuban provides a thorough examination of, and challenge to, past and present definitions of what constitutes educational success in the US. Cuban argues that in the history of American education, standards of achievement and inadequacy - as well as the reform efforts issuing from them - have been neither stable nor consistent. Nor are these standards untainted by political considerations. Rather, schools thrive or decline based on a variety of factors, including social and political dynamics, leadership in school districts and communities, and policy improvisations. Chasing Success and Confronting Failure in American Public Schools features profiles of two California high schools, Social Justice Humanitas Academy and MetWest, that are grappling with what it means to be successful (or failing) in the current moment. Each school is expanding conventional views of achievement beyond standard measures, such as test scores, graduation rates, and college admissions. But even as these schools' missions, sense of community, and curricula create an innovative form of success, both remain bound by traditional criteria set forth by district policymakers, practitioners, and parents. Through his exemplary research, Cuban illustrates how school reform is propelled by, and subject to, changing social and political fortunes. He maintains that this understanding offers educators an opportunity to re-envision school performance against an American value system that too often rewards individual merit and competitive capitalism.

Why have libraries and schools - both public institutions committed to community-based learning - adopted new technologies in dramatically different ways? Exploring the differences of technology use in schools and libraries across the country, the authors describe ways that these two institutions can collaborate to improve teaching and learning while building communities. With a focus on literacy development, they investigate how new technologies are implemented and the lessons that institutions can learn from one another.

Edited by John Woodward, a nationally acclaimed special educational technologies researcher, and Larry Cuban, a premier technology educator in the U.S., this book provides critical examination of current research into technology usage for students with disabilities. The contributing authors establish the history of special education technologies and the new requirements per IDEA ?97, then discuss the success and obstacles for special education technology implementation. Research was funded by the Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education. This book highlights: - Innovative uses of technology - Consideration of pedagogical, curricular, and classroom organizational approaches - Making technology implementation meaningful and enduring - Design considerations for researchers and developers

Edited by John Woodward, a nationally acclaimed special educational technologies researcher, and Larry Cuban, a premier technology educator in the U.S., this book provides critical examination of current research into technology usage for students with disabilities. The contributing authors establish the history of special education technologies and the new requirements per IDEA ?97, then discuss the success and obstacles for special education technology implementation. Research was funded by the Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education. This book highlights: - Innovative uses of technology - Consideration of pedagogical, curricular, and classroom organizational approaches - Making technology implementation meaningful and enduring - Design considerations for researchers and developers

Exactly what are teacher communities? What are they after? How do they begin? Do they evolve through stages? How alike or different are they from one another? How are such communities built? It is these important questions that Joel Westheimer turns to in Among Schoolteachers. This is a compelling and thoroughly readable account of two middle schools-one urban and one suburban--that attempt to build communities which will foster student growth and learning. With much fine-grained detail about how each professional community conducted its daily affairs, the author delves beneath the surface to reveal enormous differences in the goals, structures, processes, and beliefs of these communities and offers a new conceptual model for understanding teacher communities in practice. This book shatters prevailing beliefs and furthers our understanding of the ways in which teachers' relationships impact their work and their lives in schools.

In Confessions of a School Reformer, eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. Cuban begins his own story in the 1930s, when he entered first grade at a Pittsburgh public school, the youngest son of Russian immigrants who placed great stock in the promises of education. With a keen historian's eye, Cuban expands his personal narrative to analyze the overlapping social, political, and economic movements that have attempted to influence public schooling in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. He documents how education both has and has not been altered by the efforts of the Progressive movement of the first half of the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties through the seventies, and the standards-based school reform movement of the eighties through today. Cuban points out how these dissimilar movements nevertheless shared a belief that school change could promote student success and also forge a path toward a stronger economy and a more equitable society. He relates the triumphs of these school reform efforts as well as more modest successes and unintended outcomes. Interwoven with Cuban's evaluations and remembrances are his "confessions," in which he accounts for the beliefs he held and later rejected, as well as mistakes and areas of weakness that he has found in his own ideology. Ultimately, Cuban remarks with a tempered optimism on what schools can and cannot do in American democracy.

Why do so many promising ideas generated by education research fail to penetrate the world of classroom practise? In From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse, education historian Jack Schneider seeks to answer this familiar and vexing question by turning it on its head. He looks at four well-known ideas that emerged from the world of scholarship - Bloom's taxonomy, multiple intelligences, the project method, and Direct Instruction - and asks what we can learn from their success in influencing teachers. Schneider identifies four key factors that help bridge the gap between research and practise: perceived significance, philosophical compatibility, occupational realism, and transportability. Through the examination of counterexamples - similar ideas of equal promise that lacked these four qualities and did not translate into practise - Schneider shows the complexity of the relationship between theory and practise in education and suggests how that tenuous connection might be strengthened to help innovations and new insights gain traction in our schools.

A book that explores the problematic connection between education policy and practice while pointing in the direction of a more fruitful relationship, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice is a provocative culminating statement from one of America's most insightful education scholars and leaders. Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice takes as its starting point a strikingly blunt question: ""With so many major structural changes in U.S. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices been largely stable, with a modest blending of new and old teaching practices, leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations of school-goers?"" It is a question that ought to be of paramount interest to all who are interested in school reform in the United States. It is also a question that comes naturally to Larry Cuban, whose much-admired books have focused on various aspects of school reform--their promises, wrong turns, partial successes, and troubling failures. In this book, he returns to this territory, but trains his focus on the still baffling fact that policy reforms--no matter how ambitious or determined--have generally had little effect on classroom conduct and practice. Cuban explores this problem from a variety of angles. Several chapters look at how teachers, in responding to major policy initiatives, persistently adopt changes and alter particular routine practices while leaving dominant ways of teaching largely undisturbed. Other chapters contrast recent changes in clinical medical practice with those in classroom teaching, comparing the practical effects of varying medical and education policies. The book's concluding chapter distils important insights from these various explorations, taking us inside the ""black box"" of the book's title: those workings that have repeatedly transformed dramatic policy initiatives into familiar--and largely unchanged--classroom practices.

Examines an innovative approach to school district management that has been adopted by a number of urban districts in recent years: a portfolio management model, in which ""a central office oversees a portfolio of schools offering diverse organisational and curricular themes, including traditional public schools, private organisations, and charter schools.

Against the Odds offers an in-depth look at the Mapleton, Colorado, school district's transformation of two traditional high schools into seven small schools, each enrolling fewer than four hundred students. This even-handed account chronicles both the heartening successes and frequent frustrations of a district-wide embrace of the small school model.

After almost 5 decades of working in and around public schools, Larry Cuban invites us to think along with him about why it is so hard to get good schools. He offers these reflections because his contact with tens of thousands of public school participants--teachers, policymakers, researchers, parents, and students--has convinced him that "I am not alone in coping with these thorny dilemmas...as each of us muddles toward the kinds of 'good' schooling that we seek for children." Providing a strong counter voice to today's standards-based reform, "Why Is It So Hard to Get Good Schools?:

Impelled by a demand for increasing American strength in the new global economy, many educators, public officials, business leaders, and parents argue that school computers and Internet access will improve academic learning and prepare students for an information-based workplace.

But just how valid is this argument? In "Oversold and Underused," one of the most respected voices in American education argues that when teachers are not given a say in how the technology might reshape schools, computers are merely souped-up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry Cuban found that students and teachers use the new technologies far less in the classroom than they do at home, and that teachers who use computers for instruction do so infrequently and unimaginatively.

Cuban points out that historical and organizational economic contexts influence how teachers use technical innovations. Computers can be useful when teachers sufficiently understand the technology themselves, believe it will enhance learning, and have the power to shape their own curricula. But these conditions can't be met without a broader and deeper commitment to public education beyond preparing workers. More attention, Cuban says, needs to be paid to the civic and social goals of schooling, goals that make the question of how many computers are in classrooms trivial.

Examining a century of university history, Larry Cuban tackles the age-old question: What is more important, teaching or research? Using two departments (history and medicine) at Stanford University as a case study, Cuban shows how universities have organizationally and politically subordinated teaching to research for over one hundred years. He explains how university reforms, decade after decade, not only failed to dislodge the primacy of research but actually served to strengthen it. He examines the academic work of research and teaching to determine how each has influenced university structures and processes, including curricular reform. Can the dilemma of scholars vs. teachers ever be fully reconciled? This fascinating historical journey is a must read for all university administrators, faculty, researchers, and anyone concerned with educational reform.