The allure of order : high hopes, dashed expectations, and the troubled quest to remake American schooling /
Jal Mehta.
- viii, 396 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
- Studies in postwar American political development .
Machine generated contents note: -- Chapter One: The Allure of Order: Rationalizing Schools From the Progressive to the Present -- Chapter Two: The Cultural Struggle for Control Over Schooling: The Power of Ideas and the Weakness of the Educational Field -- Chapter Three: Taking Control from Above: The Rationalization of Schooling in the Progressive Era -- Chapter Four: The Forgotten Standards Movement: The Coleman Report, the Defense Department, and a Nascent Push for Educational Accountability -- Chapter Five: Setting the Problem: The Deep Roots and Long Shadows of A Nation at Risk -- Chapter Six: A Semi-Profession in an Era of Accountability -- Chapter Seven: E Pluribus Unum: How Standards and Accountability Became King -- Chapter Eight: Transforming Federal Policy: Ideas and the Triumph of Accountability Politics -- Chapter Nine: Rationalizing Schools: Patterns, Ironies, Contradictions -- Chapter Ten: Beyond Rationalization: Inverting the Pyramid, Remaking the Educational Sector -- Bibliography.
"In The Allure of Order, Jal 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 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. This book 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"--
9780199942060 (hardback) 9780190231453
2012046809
Public schools--United States. Educational change--United States. Education and state--United States. EDUCATION / General EDUCATION / Administration / General EDUCATION / Higher