"A light feeling of chaos": Educational reform and policy in the United States

Daedalus

Volumn 127, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 13-40

  Louis, Karen Seashore ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 23844526430     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1983).
2. A ludicrously false debate according to most classroom teachers, who routinely use multiple methods to teach reading. One example is a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article on the planned community of Celebration, Florida, which focuses on the controversies related to elementary-school pedagogy and curriculum. See Michael Pollan, "Town-Building is no Mickey Mouse Operation," New York Times Sunday Magazine, 14 December 1997, 56-63.
3. Seymour Martin Lipset argues that American democracy is premised on a unique ideology that is different from that of other developed countries. His analysis is compelling, but he also assumes that there is a great deal of variation in implicit democratic theories within the United States. See Seymour Martin Lipset, "Balancing the Individual and the Community: Canada versus the United States," The Responsive Community 6 (1996): 37-46.
4. Two exceptions to this are Germany and Switzerland, which, like the United States, have strong federal systems.
5. An exception is Hawaii, which has a single state system.
6. For a historical perspective on the search for equal opportunity and outcomes, see Jeffrey Mirel and David Angus, "High Standards for All? The Struggle for Equality in the American High School Curriculum, 1890-1990," American Educator 18 (1994): 4-42.
7. Most of these changes in student characteristics are not well documented and may be more consistent with the tendency of each generation to view the next as alarmingly illiterate and uncooperative.
8. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
9. To explore this issue in more detail, see Fred Newmann, Bruce King, and Mark Rigdon, "Accountability and School Performance: Implications from Restructuring Schools," Harvard Educational Review 67 (1997): 41-74;
10. and Diane Massell, Michael Kirst, and Michael Hoppe, Persistence and Change: Standards-Based Reform in Nine States (Philadelphia, Pa.: Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Pennsylvania, 1997).
11. David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1996).
12. Lipset, "Balancing the Individual and the Community."
13. Most notable is the work of Lauren Resnick and her colleagues, who have been involved for more than a decade in developing and promoting a model of school reform that is based on clear grade-level subject-matter standards and related assessments. See Daniel P. Resnick and Lauren B. Resnick, "Assessing the Thinking Curriculum: New Tools for Educational Reform," in Changing Assessments: Alternative Views of Aptitude, Achievement and Instruction, ed. Bernard R. Gifford and Mary C. O'Connor (Boston: Kluwer, 1992).
14. What constitutes a "good standard" is even more contentious. Proponents of standards ranging from the American Federation of Teachers to conservative policy activists have recently rated the actual frameworks developed by the various states as wanting.
15. The performance of U.S. students on standardized tests indicates that the variations between state and region are greater than between most developed countries. Minnesota students, for example, do better in mathematics than students in most Asian countries; students in some southern states perform hardly better than those in developing countries.
16. Andrew Porter, "The Uses and Misuses of Opportunity-to-Learn Standards," Educational Researcher 24 (1995): 21-27.
17. There is a strong research base underlying this argument. See Harold Stevenson, "Why Asian Students Still Outdistance Americans," Educational Leadership 50 (5) (1993): 63-65.
18. Gerald Bracey, "The Seventh Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education," Phi Delta Kappan 79 (1997): 120-136.
19. Karen S. Louis and Bert Versloot, "High Standards and Cultural Diversity: Cautionary Tales of Comparative Research," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 18 (3) (1997): 253-261.
20. This draws on Michael Smith and Jennifer O'Day, "Systemic School Reform," in The Politics of Curriculum and Testing, ed. Susan Fuhrman and Betty Malen (Briston, Pa.: Falmer, 1991), 233-267.
21. Linda Darling-Hammond, "What Matters Most: A Competent Teacher for Every Child," Phi Delta Kappan 78 (1996): 193-200.
22. This assumption would have left the author a mathematical illiterate if she had not been adept at covering up her inability to memorize the multiplication tables beyond the sixes.
23. Note that the states vary in terms of which branch(es) of government is responsible for education.
24. Minnesota, for example, has twenty-four competencies in its "Profile of Learning" standards for the higher attainment levels expected of graduating high-school students. Examples of the competencies range from art to citizenship and mathematics. Massell et al., Persistence and Change, suggest that in most states the trend over the past few years has been to decentralize responsibility for the definition of specific standards to the district, which may create "ownership" but pose problems for uniformity of purpose.
25. Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue.
26. Jeffrey Mirel, "School Reform, Chicago Style: Educational Innovation in a Changing Urban Context, 1976-1991," Urban Education 28 (1993): 116-149.
27. Gary Sykes, "Inspired Teaching: The Missing Element in 'Effective Schools,'" Educational Administration Quarterly 24 (1988): 461-469.
28. Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
29. Charles Teddlie and Sam Stringfield, Schools Make a Difference: Lessons Learned from a 10-year Study of School Effects (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993).
30. A consistent research finding is that less-advantaged students benefit from smaller schools, more consistent and limited curricula, and more personalized but rigorous expectations about social behavior. See, for example, Valerie E. Lee and Julia Smith, "High School Size: Which Works Best and for Whom?" Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 19 (1997): 205-227.
31. Gerald Sroufe, "New American Schools Development Corporation: Open for Business," Educational Researcher 20 (1991): 26-27.
32. Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue.
33. See, for example, Myron Lieberman, The Teacher Unions: How the NEA and AFT Sabotage Reform and Hold Students, Parents, Teachers, and Taxpayers Hostage to Bureaucracy (New York: Free Press, 1997);
34. and Charles Kerchner, Julia Koppich, and Joseph Weeres, United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997).
35. Kerchner, Koppich, and Weeres, United Mind Workers.
36. See Gary Sykes, "The New Professionalism," in The Handbook of Educational Administration, ed. Joseph Murphy and Karen Seashore Louis (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, in press).
37. Meier, The Power of Their Ideas.
38. Massell et al., Persistence and Change.
39. The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently captured this controversy. See Michael Winerip, "Schools for Sale," The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 14 June 1998, 42-49.
40. Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen, The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
41. This stands in contrast to most European countries, where students are asked to choose a technical, vocational, or university-preparatory track at about the point where the U.S. students would be entering middle school.
42. Penny Wohlstetter, "Charter Schools in the United States: The Question of Autonomy," Educational Policy 9 (1995): 331-358;
43. Maryann Raywid, "Choice Orientations, Discussions, and Prospects," Educational Policy 6 (1992): 105-122;
44. and Joe Nathan, Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity for American Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997).
45. This argument has been prominent in a number of other countries that have established publicly supported alternative-schools systems, notably the Netherlands, Denmark, and France.
46. Nathan, Charter Schools.
47. Evidence of the success of private and/or alternative schools is somewhat sketchy, largely anecdotal, and often limited to small experiments and/or extreme populations - the wealthy or the very poor.
48. A 1996 survey of charter schools indicated that 15 percent of them were networks of parents involved in home-based schooling, much of which is motivated by value differences with public schools. In addition, some charter schools have been accused of promoting specific religious values, even when they are not denominationally affiliated. It is interesting to note, however, that the United States is the only remaining Western country that does not permit the subsidization of religiously based schools under any circumstances.
49. The number of classroom hours worked by U.S. teachers is higher than in many other developed countries where the school year is longer. In other words, U.S. teachers are "front and center" and have little time for professional development.
50. Research in the Netherlands, which has had a voucher/charter system for more than fifty years, suggests that only about 15 percent of all schools offer a real choice of instructional or curricular alternatives.
51. James Comer at Yale University and Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins University are prominent among these.