History of School Reform Class Syllabus

.docx

School

University of Colorado, Boulder *

*We aren’t endorsed by this school

Course

111

Subject

History

Date

Apr 3, 2024

Type

docx

Pages

Uploaded by MateElephantMaster1301

History of School Reform in the US A Ten-Week Class David Labaree Web: http://www.stanford.edu/~dlabaree/ Twitter: @Dlabaree Blog: https://davidlabaree.com/ Course Description In this course, we will explore the history of school reform in the United States. In only 10 weeks we will not be able to pursue a systematic study of this history from beginning to end, so instead we will explore a few of the major issues in this history and examine some pertinent cases of school reform to consider their consequences. School reform is the intended change of schooling toward accomplishment of a valued goal. One problem with reform, therefore, is intent. Education is an extraordinarily complex social institution – involving a vast array of people, structures, and organizations – which means that reforming education in ways that make it produce the intended results is quite difficult. Frequently reforms unintentionally generate new problems, which then require a new wave of reform to deal with them. (This is why Elmore and McLaughlin call school reform “steady work.”) A second problem with reform is that reasonable people can disagree over the goals of schooling, which means that what is a positive reform for some people may be a negative change for others. The result is that your reaction to the success or failure of a reform effort depends on where you stand on its value, since the failure of a bad reform is a good thing. Major Issues in the History of School Reform : Framing our look at the history of reform will be two core books: Tinkering Toward Utopia , which David Tyack and Larry Cuban wrote in response to what they learned from teaching this class at Stanford for a number of years; and Someone Has to Fail , the book I wrote after teaching the same course for a decade. We’ll read their book at the start of the class and read mine in pieces across the quarter. A key theme in Tyack and Cuban is the paradox of school reform, in which it seems that schools are constantly being bounced around by a stream of reform efforts while at the same time they never seem to change. They unravel this paradox by separating the history of reform into two interacting elements: the noisy and often contradictory rounds of reform rhetoric that intrude upon schools at irregular intervals, and the slower and steadier process of evolutionary change in the structure of schooling that takes place largely outside of public view. We will look at both aspects of reform, with special attention to assessing the outcomes of reform in the realm of the structure and practice of schooling itself. My own book takes a more jaundiced view of reform, examining why the common school movement was such a success and later reforms were such failures. In the early part of the book, the focus is on how the loosely coupled organization of schooling and the peculiar characteristics of teaching as a practice have put severe limits on the possibilities of reform. In the latter part, I explore why the failure of reform is largely good news, protecting the system from damaging experiments based on misguided visions of what schools can do to solve social problems. I argue that schools are a terrible way to solve most of the social problems that they are asked to address. I also suggest that schools are doing what educational consumers want from them – providing us with social access and social advantage – even if they don’t do what reformers ask of them.

The class starts with the work of David Cohen, Richard Elmore, and Milbrey McLaughlin, who consider the organizational and pedagogical reasons it has been so difficult to change the basic grammar of schooling through deliberate reform efforts. Next we read Tyack and Cuban to get an overview of the subject. Then we look at my representation of the two most important reform movements in the history of American schools, one promoting the common school and the other pushing for progressive education. Next we look at the rhetorics of school reform by examining a series of reform documents from the last 200 years. We will then look in detail at the nature and variety of school reform rhetoric, through a close study of a few key reform texts over the years, including pedagogical progressivism, administrative progressivism, desegregation, the standards movement, and school choice. In succeeding weeks, we explore the core factors that make the school system so resistant to reform and consider some of the kinds of reform practices that are more likely to bring about results. Then we examine the system’s core social role, showing how the system continually adapts to pressure for greater social access by stratifying instruction in a way the preserves social advantage. In week 8 we look at issues surrounding race and American schooling. In week 9, we put the issue of school reform in the larger context of state-driven social change efforts, by focusing on James Scott’s framework, which examines why it has been so hard over the years for governments to impose order on complex social institutions such as schooling. For the last class, we read the final chapters in my book, talk about what schools can do, and what they can’t do. What This Class Is and Is Not About : This class is intended to encourage you to think hard about the things that make educational reform so complex, contradictory, difficult, and often dysfunctional. Its focus is on analyzing what happens to reform efforts between initial proposals and eventual outcomes. This means that its aim is not to provide you with a how-to manual that will enable you to be a successful reformer. I don’t think such a manual exists, and the dream of finding the one right way to fix things has done a lot of damage to schools over the years. Instead, think of this class as an exercise in realism, a set of cautionary tales that I hope will help you locate your own efforts to improve schools within a useful historical framework. The idea is to encourage students to develop a rich understanding of the American system of schooling – even a grudging respect for it – before trying to institute reforms, and to instill a little humility into people’s plans for saving the world with better schools. Audience This class was originally designed for master’s and doctoral students in education, but it has also works for graduate or undergraduate students in any field who are interested in learning about the nature of the American system of education. Readings Books : The following books are used in the course; both are in print. Also, pirated digital versions of both books can be found online. Tyack, David & Cuban, Larry. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: Reflections on a century of public school reform . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Labaree, David F. (2010). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2

Assigned Articles and Other Readings: All other readings are available in PDF on the course Google Drive. Course Outline Below are the topics we will cover, week by week, with the readings for each week. For each week, I provide: a link to tips for how to approach each week’s readings; links for access to the PDFs of these readings; a link to the class slides for that week. Week 1 Introduction to course Tips for week 1 readings Elmore, Richard F., & McLaughlin, Milbrey W. (1988). Steady work . Santa Monica, CA: Rand. Cohen, David K. (1988), Teaching practice: Plus que ça change. In Phillip W. Jackson (ed.), Contributing to Educational change (pp. 27-84). Berkeley: McCutchan. Labaree, David F. (2010). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Introduction. Class slides for week 1: slides 1a , slides 1b , slides 1c Week 2 The History of Educational Reform: An Overview Tips for week 2 readings Tyack, David & Cuban, Larry. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: Reflections on a century of public school reform . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Metz, Mary H. (1990). Real school: A universal drama amid disparate experience. In Douglas E. Mitchell & Margaret E. Goertz (Eds.), Education Politics for the New Century (pp. 75-91). New York: Falmer. Class slides for week 2 Week 3 The Two Major Reform Movements – Common School and Progressivism; Schooling and the Meritocracy Tips for week 3 readings Labaree. Someone has to fail . Chapters 1, 2, and 3. McClay, William M. (2016). A distant elite: How meritocracy went wrong. The Hedgehog Review 18:2 (Summer). Class slides for week 3 Week 4 Factors That Make Reform Difficult Tips for week 4 readings Labaree. Someone has to fail . Chapters 4 and 5 Meyer, John W. & Rowan, Brian. (1983). The structure of educational organizations. In Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 71-97), edited by John W. Meyer and William R. Scott. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. 3

Your preview ends here

Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version

Access to all documents
Unlimited textbook solutions
24/7 expert homework help