FAPPAF Bucket
Someday I will be dead, and maybe you will want to know about the media I consumed or wanted to consume. Furthermore, while I am still living, perhaps you want ideas on gifts you could give me. Well, either way, you've come to the right place.
Schools are ALWAYS failing, so the myth goes
Why do we presume that poor kids need a more rigid and authoritarian school climate than “ordinary” kids?
David Berliner and Bruce Biddle wrote a book on the topic: The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. Richard Rothstein has continued the theme in most of his work, but rereading The Way We Were?, one realizes that public schools have always been driven by crises. Albert Shanker once acknowledged to me that he realized the crisis was a fiction, but that it was a useful fiction without which no one would take public education seriously.
Noted education historian Lawrence Cremin is quoted by Michael Goldenberg in a blog I just received, as saying:
“American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and Congress, the Federal Reserve Board. …Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by education reforms, especially educational reform defined as school reform, is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direction attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the blame instead on the schools. It is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education.”
