The School Reform Landscape Fraud, Myth, and Lies [Hardcover]

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.Is the school reform movement an attack on the countrys 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 researchl3#