BOOK REVIEW:
How do teachers’ unions stifle school reform? Rod Paige counts the ways: they refuse to allow great teachers to receive higher pay; they prevent incompetent teachers from being fired; they pressure maverick teachers to stop doing things differently; they fight to ensure that teachers are not evaluated by supervisors or by using test-score data; they don’t want parents to choose their children’s schools; they don’t want children to be allowed to leave failing schools; they attack charter schools; and they rally to ensure that school board elections are won by those who share their views. Paige, former U.S. secretary of education and superintendent of schools in Houston, pulls no punches in this book. He seeks to unmask the goals and actions of teachers’ unions in an effort to demonstrate that the unions are the biggest reason why our education system produces such disappointing results. (Not much attention is paid in this book to other obstacles to change.) But since unions are just doing their job by taking care of their own interests, Paige writes, it is up to the rest of us—parents, school boards, state school chiefs, think tanks, institutions of higher education, journalists, and Congress—to challenge them when necessary. Unions will only change when we force them to, and Paige aims to show readers how to make that happen.
This conference volume addresses two big issues: smaller classes and smaller schools. Its ten chapters, written by some of the leading lights in education scholarship, employ innovative methodologies to examine the costs, benefits, and tradeoffs of these popular reform strategies. The punch line, as reported by Loveless and Hess, is that smaller classes and smaller schools “hold promise in certain times and places,” but that implementing them at large scale “is likely to prove shortsighted and wasteful.” The reasons are rather obvious, if illuminated by the volume’s research papers: Smaller classes require more teachers, which makes improving teacher quality a lot tougher; both reforms require retrofitted facilities, a hugely expensive undertaking. Yet scale is not unimportant. Thomas Dee and his colleagues find greater parental involvement in small rural schools, for instance, and Douglas Ready and Valerie Lee identify serious shortcomings in huge schools and classrooms. If policymakers, philanthropists, and educators wade through these sometimes technical papers and take their conclusions seriously, the medium classes and medium schools movement should be right around the corner.
Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul. Edward Humes (HarperCollins). The authors of these books were among the journalists, activists, and onlookers who flooded into Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005 for the latest legal skirmish over the teaching of creationism in the public schools. The Dover School Board had ordered that students be alerted of “gaps” in evolutionary theory and of the availability of a supplemental textbook advancing the rival notion of intelligent design. The ensuing trial unmasked the overtly religious intentions of the board and of the leading organizations promoting intelligent design, not to mention the unscientific character of the theory itself. Indeed, so decisive was the evidence that Chapman, a screenwriter with a “slight antipathy toward certain aspects of religion” (and who also happens to be Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson), concludes that creationism in all its forms should be taught in science classes nationwide through the lens of the Dover dispute. With a filmmaker’s eye for detail, Chapman presents a blow-by-blow account of the trial interspersed with interviews with the major players. Humes’s book is more authoritative in tone and comprehensive in scope, reviewing parallel battles on the Kansas State Board of Education and the history of church-state conflicts involving science instruction and religion. Both books rightly decry the marginalization of evolution in biology textbooks and state standards. Their strident warnings about future intrusions of religion into the classroom, however, ring somewhat hollow given the outcome of the case.
The antitesting crowd can barely contain its excitement over this latest volume from Arizona State’s David Berliner and Sharon Nichols, a Berliner protégé now at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Other than usefully reminding readers of “Campbell' “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures,” this is a nearly unrelieved tirade against high-stakes testing in general and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in particular. A couple of pages are devoted to two not-bad alternatives, a British-style inspectorate and end-of-course exams. But 99 percent of what’s here boils down to an attack not only on NCLB and high-stakes testing, but also on results-based educational accountability and external accountability in general.
Linda Darling-Hammond sets out to combat the “myth” that “good teacher education programs are virtually nonexistent.” She builds the book around the findings from case studies of seven “exemplary” institutions and proceeds to distill sweeping conclusions regarding teacher education and credentialing. Much of the volume proceeds from the assumption that the author and her case-study contributors know good preparation when they see it. There is some modestly interesting survey data in chapter 3 that makes the case that teachers from the model programs feel more confident than their peers and that their principals are relatively high on them as well. Several recommendations for improving teacher preparation seem sensible, including better linking of preparation to practice, targeting investment in the most promising candidates, and selecting and promoting teacher educators on the basis of mentoring and clinical skills. The policy recommendations are more predictable; those acquainted with the author’s oeuvre won’t find any surprises. In fact, the author is listed an astonishing 45 times in her book’s index! |
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