The School Reform Landscape: Fear, Mythologies, and Lies describes this nation's policymakers awkwardly stumbling through education reforms based on highly questionable political ideology and high-stakes assessments for all children. Provided are a series of actions that use fear and very unsound research studies to eliminate the American school systems and replace them with a dual-system, which discriminates against the poor, handicapped and students with little social capital.
The authors provide a series of needed actions to make American public education the best it can be. Review: As the subtitle indicates, Tienken (Seton Hall Univ.) and Orlich (emer., Washington State Univ.) are critical of current school reform efforts, especially overreliance on standardized tests, national curricula (including common core standards), and the spread of charter schools.
In the first chapter, they contrast liberal reform policies for an inclusive, democratic school system that emphasizes thinking skills and democratic social values, advocated by proponents from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey, with parallel reform efforts (such as the 19th-century Lancaster system) that lead to dual educational approaches separating privileged children from the poor.
They argue that assertions that schools are failing, postulated by conservatives after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, repeated in the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, and presented as justification for the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation, are false and put forward with little supporting evidence.
Current federal policies exemplified by Race to the Top continue this trend and are anti-democratic. This summary of the liberal critique of the current state of education in the US is not particularly well written, but the authors make their case compellingly and cite much of the research and policy literature by others that supports their position.
Summing Up: Recommended. General readers, undergraduate students, and professionals. CHOICE Is the school reform movement an attack on the country's democratic and unitary system of public education? In The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies, co-authors Christopher H. Tienken, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University, and Donald C.
Orlich, professor emeritus at Washington State University, make that case. ... The authors present well-researched critiques of A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, charter schools, high-stakes testing, state curriculum standards and the national Common Core State Standards program. Moreover, the abundance of research to support the claims made in The School Reform Landscape stands in stark contrast to the lack of empirical evidence present in so many criticisms of the current state of public education.
School Administrator Tienken and Orlich provide readers with a behind-the-scenes analysis of the Common Core and its accompanying assessment movement, revealing the new standards as 'empirically vapid', and demonstrating how the performance of US students on high-stakes and international exams has been interpreted in misleading and amateur ways - only to manufacture a crisis in our public schools and sell a reform model that purports to close achievement gaps between privileged and disadvantaged groups. ...
Readers of this text get an insider's view of the dirty politics of American education reform and the mainstream media's ill-informed and unsophisticated portrayal of it. International School Magazine The education reform emperor has no clothes! Tienken and Orlich bravely and brilliantly tell the inconvenient truth about the mega reforms in American education history with abundant evidence, incisive analysis, and infectious passion to defend public education.
A must read for all concerned about the fate of public schools and America's future. -- Yong Zhao, Ph.D., presidential chair and associate dean for Global Education, University of Oregon, author of World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. Tienken and Orlich pull back the curtain on the latest evolution
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