Since the early 1980s, America has been caught up in a perpetual process of education reform, bringing change upon change to the programs, structures, and curricula that govern the public schools--and costing a small fortune. The results have been disappointing. Indeed, it is precisely because reforms have fared so poorly that there is so much pressure to keep the reform process going.
How can America get off the treadmill of perpetual reform and succeed in improving its schools? It was this challenge that prompted John Raisian, director of the Hoover Institution, and Tad Taube, president of the Koret Foundation, to create the Koret Task Force on K12 Education, a group of experts widely recognized for thinking outside the box about educational problems and solutions. In A Primer on America’s Schools (Hoover Press, 2001), this group takes an important step toward school reform by providing a broad overview of the current state of American education.
Each chapter is written by a task force member who specializes in the subject at hand. The common goal is to cut through all the complexities (and, often, the unwarranted assumptions and unfounded assertions) and to convey--in simple language devoid of the usual academic jargon--the basics that the public should know. The result is a crash course on the most important policy questions facing education today, including
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How much are American students really learning?
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How much are we spending on the schools, and what are we getting for it?
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Are the usual reform nostrums, such as smaller class size, likely to work?
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Why is accountability so difficult to achieve in this system?
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Are teachers being properly trained by education schools?
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Why is the current curriculum so watered down?
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What are the impacts of teachers unions?
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What should we expect from reforms based on school choice?
Terry M. Moe, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of political science at Stanford University, is the author of Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public and the coauthor (with John Chubb) of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. He also edited Private Vouchers (Hoover Institution Press), the first book to chronicle the movement to provide privately funded vouchers to low-income children.
Contributors: The Koret Task Force on K12 EducationJohn E. Chubb, Williamson M. Evers, Chester E. Finn Jr., Eric A. Hanushek, Paul T. Hill, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Caroline M. Hoxby, Terry M. Moe, Paul E. Peterson, Diane Ravitch, Herbert J. Walberg.
The Koret Task Force on K12 Education is a joint endeavor of the Hoover Institution and the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, its primary sponsor.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs.
