TCR

In his most recent book, Michael Grenfell makes a comprehensive contribution to our understanding of the work of influential French social philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu. As its title implies, this book is for readers interested in Bourdieu’s work on education although his engagement with such topics as culture, economics, art, literature, politics, language and media is also acknowledged. The contribution is timely, enabling Grenfell to knowledgeably review the life work of this key sociological thinker following his recent passing in 2002. Throughout the book, the point is made strongly that Bourdieu’s work must be understood in terms of his own biography. Indeed, this book stands apart from other volumes as a result of Grenfell’s skillful interweaving of the social, economic and political context into which Bourdieu was born and grew up and his various projects and publications. This ‘socio-genetic’ reading helps to offset the misunderstanding that his work has attracted as a... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Gene Glass’s thoughtful and provocative book launches angry thunderbolts from the Olympus of educational research. His main targets are a gaggle of would-be reformers of our schools who do their murky deeds under the guise of rescuing us from educational crisis. Glass is a distinguished pioneer in the statistical analysis of educational data. The major thesis of his somewhat puckishly-named book is that the specter of educational crisis has been evoked to justify a variety of ill-conceived educational adventures, including vouchers, charter schools, high-stakes testing, open enrollment, and many more. These policies, he says, claim to seek greater educational achievements but, in fact, aim to reduce public spending on schooling, and in particular, to reduce the costs of educating black, Hispanic, and poor students. They also tend to promote and subsidize insulated schooling for more affluent whites. He holds that these results are not only the observed consequences of such... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

What is “immersion” and what benefits do “immersion” programs offer students? These are central questions in the fields of second and foreign language teaching and learning, but more broadly to all educators who are attempting to adapt their programs and instructional practices for increasingly ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations. Research on effective programs and classroom practices to enhance bi and multilingualism is scarce, although some patterns regarding age of instruction, length of instruction, and relationships of second language (L2) and first language (L1) learning processes (i.e., “transfer”) are emerging . Defining “Immersion” education and synthesizing the research base regarding the varieties of immersion programs being implemented around the globe are two of the central foci of this edited volume. Some of the key questions this volume explores include: What are the effects of implementation differences (decisions on how program languages are allocated-for example by time, by teacher, by content... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

For students and scholars of education, Faye Harrison’s Outsider Within provides an intriguing entrée to debates and tendencies in sociocultural anthropology over the last forty years or so. To be sure, Harrison occupies a particular place in these debates—the place, as she puts it, of “outsider within.” The book is, therefore, no disinterested treatise. Yet what stands out most in Harrison’s account is her passionate defense of anthropology as a holistic social science that also holds out one of the best hopes for achieving equity and social justice in a troubled global age. She exemplifies such hopes herself as she engages in “reworking anthropology” toward its true promise as a discipline. Professor Harrison brings an impressive and pertinent resume to her task. A Black woman from Norfolk, Virginia, she pursued her education at Brown (undergraduate) and Stanford (graduate) before returning to her native South to teach at a variety of strong... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Patrick Samway’s book, Educating Darfur Refugees, A Jesuit’s Efforts in Chad, is not a book about pedagogy and a philosophy of education. And it is. A memoir chronicling the time he spent in refugee camps on Chad’s side of the Sudanese border, Samway tells us about his efforts to set up schools. As he does so, he teaches us the recent and not so recent history of this part of Africa. We learn about the respective internal affairs of Chad, Libya, and Sudan, but also about the complicated, triangulated power-plays between the three nations as they vie for political influence and oil-drenched economics. We also learn about the ineffective, unhelpful, or indifferent postures offered by foreign nationals. In particular, Samway recalls George W. Bush’s obsession with Iraq as China’s African gaze grows in notable proportion. On leave from an academic post, Samway, a professor and a priest, spends the 2004-2005 academic year... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

The present work is an edited volume of papers by education researchers and scholars on the new institutionalism in education. At slightly more than 230 pages, it is a slim and compact work consisting of thirteen chapters, few of which crack twenty pages (inclusive of notes and references). Most of the contributions to this volume began as conference papers, and many retain something of the flavor of this format. Studies are narrowly constructed and arguments succinctly stated, rather than given expansive discussion or treatment. The New Institutionalism in Education is therefore decidedly modest in scope, and is not likely to be entirely satisfying to anyone seeking a comprehensive survey of institutionalist writings in education, or an ambitious effort in agenda-building in education research. And yet, it’s a worthwhile read, if mainly as a fairly brisk introduction to different strands of education research currently taking place under the institutionalist banner, as... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Cuban’s Frogs into Princes: Writings on School Reform provides a trail that traces school reform from 1962, when schools struggled with implementing desegregation policies, to 2007, as schools still struggle to effectively educate diverse student populations. The selections are framed within three perspectives: as an insider, as an outsider, and finally as a teacher/administrator/researcher with a merged perspective on school reform. From the first selection until the last, there is a profound sense of hope in Cuban’s writings, despite historical evidence that educational policymakers seem to persist in making the same mistake over and over by ignoring the role of the teacher in school reform. Despite the passage of time represented in the collection, a similar theme emerges; reforms live or die in the classroom, not the boardroom. The value of the teacher in school reform is first framed in Cuban’s examination of his own teaching. In the 1962 selection, Teaching... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

An essay review of Sherman Dorn's Accountability Frankenstein: Understanding and Taming the Monster

The time has come to face the growing problem of college-loan indebtedness. Otherwise—like the current economic crisis that was partly caused by declining home values—college-loan indebtedness will some day contribute to enormous financial problems for a large number of individual Americans and for the nation as a whole.

Knowledge economy, development and the future of higher education is not for the reader seeking a breezy treatment of the future of higher education. This volume, written by Professor Michael A. Peters of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provides a rigorous intellectual exercise for the reader through a collection of essays that robustly frames the past, present and future of higher education with many references to significant philosophers and intellectuals. My view is that if the reader does not have a working knowledge of the contributions of Karl Marx, Freidrich Hayek, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martin Heidegger, and Cardinal Newman to intellectual history, this volume will present significant challenges since much of what Peters provides is his analysis of various topics framed by these intellectuals. It is one of a series of books that “…maps the emergent field of educational futures” (p.... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

With The Six Secrets of Change, Michael Fullan returns to the themes that have comprised the guiding principle of his work – change and leadership. His previous book, Turnaround Leadership, focused on what he called “the real reform agenda” or changing schools as a way to reduce the income gap between rich and poor students. Previously, in his seminal work, The New Meaning of Educational Change, Fullan provided practical resources and ideas for school reform. No one can accuse Fullan of thinking small. Using examples from businesses and health and public education systems, The Six Secrets of Change seeks to apply principles that are common to “successful organizational change under complex conditions” (p. vii). A theory of change is useful only if it “travels well,” meaning that it can be applied to different situations and can “practically and insightfully guide the understanding of complex situations and point to actions likely to... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Coming to the second edition of Writing for Social Scientists, I speculated on what occasioned the University of Chicago Press to re-issue this book after twenty-one years. Market readiness and potential sales, almost certainly. Perhaps Howard Becker felt moved to answer the urgent calls of academics confronting daunting transformations wrought by social software, digital media, the “crisis in scholarly publishing” (Waters, 2004), and innumerable threats to academic inquiry  — illustrated by Bruno Labor’s (2004) plaintive mediation on “wars” and the possibilities of critique. In light of these changes, how would Becker revise his approach to writing? Well comme-ci, comme ca. The second edition’s preface offers: “Many things haven’t changed since this book first appeared. But some have …” (viii). In a characteristically low-key manner, Becker notes how computers have affected “… our situations as writers” (viii). Becker describes briefly both the unpredictable influence of computers (Chapter 9) and of university reorganization... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 promised the moon—100% of students, including the most economically deprived, would become proficient in math and reading by 2014.  Seven years later, NCLB has become what one of the bill's key sponsors, Democratic Congressman George Miller, calls "the most negative brand in the country."  What went wrong?  And how can the legislation be improved to truly reduce the "poverty gap" in achievement?   A new volume edited by Adam Gamoran, professor of sociology and education policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sheds important light on what should be done.  The chapters, written by a diverse group of scholars that includes sociologists, economists, education professors, and public policy experts, are drawn from a February 2006 conference.  Because NCLB remained relatively new at the time, many of the chapters report on studies conducted on the efficacy of older state-level policies that mirror what NCLB... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Robert Badger, chair and professor of geology at the State University of New York Potsdam, gathered essays from colleagues representing different disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and life and physical sciences for this edited volume, Ideas that Work in College Teaching. The contributors all teach, or taught, at SUNY Potsdam, a liberal arts school with over 3,500 undergraduates and almost 700 master’s students, so the experiences they describe make the book most useful for instructors at similar schools. But their ideas are easily adapted for teaching in many other higher education environments. And most readers will discover an appreciation, maybe even a longing, for the sense of community and conversations created among teaching colleagues reflected in the collaborative effort to share teaching ideas beyond their campus to the wider teaching community. Certainly we can value the process of thoughtful reflection that allows good teachers to also produce good writing... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

My headline judgements on this book read as follows: • This book is well worth reading. • The title is somewhat misleading: Some of the chapters (notably chapters 2-5 and 12) deal with economic and cost issues only cursorily, if at all. They focus instead on structures. • There are two outstandingly good chapters in the book. • There are no really weak chapters. • The book brings together US (Chapters 4-6 and 12) and international experience. • The concluding chapter rather states the obvious. • Because it is a multi-authored volume, there is some repetition. • Because it is a multi-authored volume, there is no overall coherent framework – but this has some value because in reality we all have to grapple with a variety of frameworks. The editors have persuaded some well-known names in the field of distance and online learning to contribute to this book, and the 19 authors bring a wealth of experience that makes the book well worth... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

The title of the series in which this book is published is “Education, Politics and Culture” which suits the lively and politically committed content very well. Fundamentally, the book is about how a progressive educational movement aimed at facilitating smaller and more democratic urban schools in America became hijacked by the neo-conservative agenda of the Bush administration and its many powerful allies. In so doing it cannot fail to tackle the wider educational and political issues of the last eight years and their antecedents, which it does with admirable clarity and detail.   Although school size is important, the small schools movement has traditionally been more about a democratic ideology of education that rejects the mass, bureaucratised authoritarianism of many large publicly funded schools. Smaller schools potentially make it more possible to organise education in a more supportive, inclusive, egalitarian and humanitarian way. Moreover, this smaller scale is also seen to... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

No matter how smart or articulate they may be, many people who think about educational policy in the United States have a bit of arrogance.  They assume that the experiences of other nations have little to teach us about the limits and possibilities of educational reforms.  This is not true in all cases, of course.  For example, in their book advocating the use of vouchers, Chubb and Moe (1990) draw directly on what was happening in England at the time.  In many ways, the use of vouchers in England was a flawed and some would say failed experiment.  While I am in very strong disagreement with them on the issue of vouchers, for all of the problems of their analysis at least Chubb and Moe did look outside our national boundaries. Another example is what has been happening in Brazil, specifically in the city of Porto Alegre.  There, the reforms surrounding... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Josh Corngold have made an important contribution to understanding the process by which teaching and political learning can guide students to becoming engaged citizens in a pluralistic democracy. Building on their previous work in Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduate for lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility that detailed the multidimensionality of colleges and universities’ approach to civic and moral development, Education for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement centers on the premise that the core tenets of political engagement are political understanding, skill, motivation, and involvement. Since the teaching and learning process related to these political tenets is the central focus of the book, the authors present compelling arguments about how academic achievement and political development are mutually reinforcing. The content of the book is from the Political Engagement Project (PEP), a study that investigated a wide range of approaches that were considered... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

The Early Care and Education Teaching Workforce at the Fulcrum: An Agenda for Reform offers a comprehensive review of the current educational research related to training, certifying and retaining a quality workforce for young children. The worker population referred to in the text includes early childhood teachers, teacher assistants, aides and family/home care providers. The book sets out to provide the evidence needed to convince educators and policy makers of the urgency to set new goals and move quickly toward overhauling early childhood care evaluation, design and performance goals.   The authors cite education research studies along with reports and information based on labor statistics and child care laws and regulations. The premise (based on their overview of the research) is that the state of early care and education (ECE) recruitment and training is inconsistent across the country and that many programs designed to support teachers and child care workers are... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Lisa Stulberg attempts “to broaden our current understanding of school choice politics by focusing on the complex participation of African Americans in choice reforms” (p. 7). As an assistant professor who teaches courses in foundations in education, leadership and policy studies to pre- and post service teachers and school leaders, I find our study of school politics to be one of the more interesting units. Students get a chance to role play conservative, liberal and radical perspectives on current educational issues. My hope is that they emerge less naïve about how the intersecting elements of race, power, and money factor into the political landscape upon which our schools operate. The ability to make critical connections between fundamental philosophical beliefs about the role of economics and government in democratic society should improve our understanding of the complexities of school choice politics. Stulberg challenges readers not to settle for simplistic answers to... (preview truncated at 150 words.)