American Educational Reform Research Articles

Review of American Education Reform: Achievements and Challenges

American education reform has been a topic of continuous discussion and debate for several decades. After World War II, the country has witnessed significant transformations in its educational system, with several rounds of reforms aimed at improving the quality of education for students. This paper presents a review of the direction of American education reform, including its history, progress, challenges, and emerging trends. The paper also discusses the characteristics that emerged during the reform process, including the speed and pace of reform, the focus on adult and vocational education, and the achievements and challenges faced by the American education system.

Review of American Education Reform: Achievements and Challenges

American education reform has been a topic of continuous discussion and debate for several decades. After World War II, the country has witnessed significant transformations in its educational system, with several rounds of reforms aimed at improving the quality of education for students. This paper presents a review of the direction of American education reform, including its history, progress, challenges, and emerging trends. The paper also discusses the characteristics that emerged during the reform process, including the speed and pace of reform, the focus on adult and vocational education, and the achievements and challenges faced by the American education system.

Teacher Blame as the Grammar of Public School Reform

AbstractHistorical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified teacher quality—a later trademark of NCLB—as a panacea for school improvement, but it remained an amorphous idea bound up in gendered and racialized assumptions. The historical results were a swirl of policies that increased standardization across the schools. This article concludes that teacher blame was a critical driver for federal intervention in local public education, and that the roots of that intervention extend far deeper than historians have allowed.

¿Hasta dónde influyen las agendas internacionales en los sistemas educativos centroamericanos? Un marco teórico para su análisis

En este ensayo se propone un marco teórico para el estudio del influjo internacional sobre los procesos de reforma educativa en Centroamérica iniciados en los años noventa, a partir de las particularidades políticas y culturales de los contextos centroamericanos. Se hizo el ejercicio de poner en diálogo la corriente «internacional» y «cultural» de la economía política crítica de la educación para comprender la influencia de los organismos internacionales y sus agendas educativas en los procesos de reforma educativa, en función de las dinámicas históricas nacionales. En otras palabras, para entender por una parte, la interacción entre la globalización como capitalismo global, y los sistemas educativos nacionales centroamericanos como parte de los Estados-Nación; y por otra, las relaciones de poder entre los actores nacionales y su capacidad de agencia para hegemonizar ideológicamente a través del proceso de reforma educativa, una visión de sociedad y ciudadano en tanto clase, etnia, religión y género en un país.
 Palabras claveReformas educativas en Centroamérica, sociología de la educación, economía política, globalización, hegemonía ideológica

Reforming Educational Administration: Ethical Considerations

Serious ethical questions regarding the preparation of prospective school administrators have arisen as a result of the American educational reform movement. The university is responsible to a number of stakeholders. Of primary concern are the students, the state, and the employing school district. Of equal concern, but further removed from direct contact with the university, are the faculty, students, and parents in the employing school district. Thus, preparation programs for administrators who will lead schools and school districts have considerable social impact. Ethical questions center on the university's recognition of its social responsibility and its understanding of the social consequences of graduating ill-prepared administrators. As a result faculty in educational administration programs must consider the motives, means, and consequences of these programs.

School accountability and standard-based education reform: The recall of social efficiency movement and scientific management

This study examines issues of success/failure, performance, and effectiveness in the contemporary reform discourses of school accountability. It pays attention to a particular meaning of success/failure and its implications for current public school systems and education reform movements, not merely as a school accountability issue, but as an ontological one, which is inscribed in the politics of inclusion and exclusion. The mechanisms of standardization, classification, and normalization embedded in the practices of high-stakes testing are reconsidered through an analysis of the discussion of social efficiency in the early twentieth century. The study also examines its recall several decades later as part of the quality control and management of individuals, schools, and states. In exploring connectedness between the old and new levels of social efficiency, this study suggests that success/failure becomes reinscribed as a particular system of reasoning to normalize the subjectivity in discourses of the current American education reform and OECD’s PISA. The study concludes by criticizing the rationale of recent educational reforms based on the search for past and present social efficiency movements in schools.

Special Need Students in the Struggle for the Character of Schooling in America

One of the most contentious issues over American educational reform is government sponsorship of school vouchers and tax credits in elementary and secondary education. Voucher advocates have long believed that public schools have little interest in education reform which diminishes its monopolistic position in the public education enterprise which effectuates a system of escalating cost, inefficiencies, and unacceptable student performance. Also, they claim that in a nation historically devoted to free enterprise and equal education opportunity, the expansion of school choice opportunity is a natural progression. Conversely, voucher opponents posit that such programs are not only unconstitutional, but would also redirect valuable resources away from schools serving students with the greatest need. They view voucher policy as highly divisive in that it fosters government entanglement with churches and serves as a catalyst for the re-segregation of public schools, further amplifying educational inequality. High-profile public battles over school vouchers in the United States have mainly focused on poor and minority children served by public schools in large urban areas. On the other hand, school choice for special need students, though expanding significantly, has not received as much attention. This article reviews the legal history of private contracting for special education services, describes the current choice programs for students with disabilities, recounts the legal challenges, discusses policy implications, and considers its formulation in the context of the largest levels of inequality in American History.

An Examination of the Debate Surrounding Core Curriculum State Standards in American Education Reform

An Examination of the Debate Surrounding Core Curriculum State Standards in American Education Reform

“…And that’s why I Teach For America”: American education reform and the role of redemptive stories

AbstractThis article interrogates the discursive relationship between school reform and redemption in the United States by examining the personal narratives of Teach For America corps members. After tracing the history of Teach For America and describing the rites of passage in which teachers’ “redemptive stories” are told, I analyze the generic arc that underlies them and show that it mirrors broader processes of in-group socialization. In doing so, I argue that Teach For America’s brand of redemptive storytelling – in addition to crafting individual identity, contributing to group cohesion, and enlivening performance at ritualized events – also affects organizational authority. As corps members master their stories of reform and redemption, paralleling the path to becoming “master teachers,” they participate in a process of “becoming” that reproduces in micro-scale the maturation of Teach For America. More profoundly, these transformations represent a distinct response to traditions of American confessional storytelling and the accountability-based education movement. Redemptive stories thus bind the socialization of the individual reformer to issues afoot more broadly in the province of education policy.

In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform John P.Spencer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform John P. Spencer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.When Oakland Public Schools superintendent Marcus Foster was assassinated by the Symbionese Liberation Army on Election Day 1973 because they incorrectly believed he was attempting to place police officers in schools, he left a legacy of achievement and success in urban education rarely equaled before or since. As a teacher, principal, and associate superintendent in Philadelphia and as the first African American superintendent of Oakland Public Schools, Foster forged alliances among disparate community interests and raised academic achievements in two of the most polarized and challenging urban educational environments in the country. With a new biography, In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform, John P. Spencer chronicles Foster's professional career while simultaneously using his successes and struggles as a front-line educator to comment on the last half century of American educational reform. For Spencer, the issues Marcus Foster struggled with on a daily basis as an educator-issues which incorporated sociological, pedagogical, political, and economic concerns-are the same issues which have bedeviled recent school reform efforts. Foster's achievements, therefore, illuminate both the possibilities and limitations of present-day attempts at reforming public education.Spencer begins with an examination of Foster's own schooling, first in the Philadelphia public schools and then at Cheney State College where he was certified as a teacher, one of the few professions relatively accessible to working class African Americans in the de facto segregated schools of the mid-1940s. After a year teaching in rural Maryland, Foster landed a job near his old neighborhood in South Philadelphia, returning to the urban educational environment just in time to witness the effects post World War II racial liberalism was beginning to have on urban schools. Spencer views these effects, and much of Foster's career, through the prism of the tension between early racial liberalism, with its belief that integration and high expectations for all could suffice to advance academic achievement and social mobility among the poor, and a latter view which saw the apparently intractable connection between race, poverty, and academic underachievement as symptomatic of larger sociological, political, and economic issues of inequity. At its core...this book is about the tension between stories of educational uplift and analyses of entrenched inequity (17).That much of Foster's early career centered on emphasizing the former, the connection between high expectations and high achievement, should come as no surprise Spencer suggests. Foster's often difficult path to the highest levels of his profession was a textbook example of what was possible even in challenging environments when parents and schools successfully instilled in children not only the necessity of academic achievement but also the belief that such achievement was within their abilities. …

An Advocate for a Lost Cause: Prudence Crandall, African American Education and School Reform

An Advocate for a Lost Cause: Prudence Crandall, African American Education and School Reform

DICKENS IN 1842: COMING TO HIS SENSES ABOUT AMERICA

As recent work by historians and critical theorists reminds us, the senses have a history. Whether we judge sight or hearing to be the ‘superior’ sense, how we differentiate sounds from noise, what power relationships we find inscribed in these distinctions, what kind of information we glean from the myriad sensory stimuli constantly available to our organs of perception – these matters take us deep into the culture and, in particular, open up new ways to understand the experience of modernity. In their relationship to the ambient sounds of their culture, no less than in the gaze they brought to bear upon the world, Victorian men and women forged their identities. We should not overlook this fact as we try to come to terms with Dickens's experience of America. A particularly rich archive of letters, speeches, diaries, newspaper articles, and first-person accounts allows us to speak with some certainty about his attitudes on a range of subjects – slavery, international copyright, the penny press, and American penal and educational reform. But Dickens's writings about his first American trip are nowhere more memorable or revealing than when he digresses from descriptions of events, issues, and controversies to give vivid expression to a more basic and visceral form of perception – to the testimony of his eyes and ears.

Alpha Children Wear Grey: Postwar Ontario and Soviet Education Reform

The author examines a prominent Ontario education commission’s tour through the Soviet Union in 1966. This tour is situated within the larger contexts of the Cold War, and postwar North American education reform. Using the commission’s unpublished tour report on the U.S.S.R., and the theoretical tools of utopia and dystopia, contradictions within the commission’s response to Soviet education are explored and then linked to deeper tensions in their views on education and its ideological role in postwar Ontario society. Keywords: education, Ontario, Cold War, utopianism, liberalism

Twentieth-Century American Education Reform in the Global Context

As detailed in the articles throughout this issue, the U.S. education system experienced a number of structural developments throughout the 20th century. These changes served to shift the landscape of decision-making authority in multiple areas of primary and secondary schooling. This article provides an international perspective on the changes undergone by the American system, painting a broad picture of where the trends in the United States’ educational system fit within changes worldwide. To best understand the possible implications of changes in the United States, I describe trends in educational centralization and decentralization in other nations, placing the American changes in a broader context shedding light on where education in the United States could be headed.

Teachers Unions and American Education Reform: The Politics of Blocking

Why has the modern era of American education reform been such a disappointment? Why has a nation so dedicated to improving its schools continually pulled up short, year after year, embracing weak reforms unsuited to the challenge and refusing to throw off the shackles of the past? The answer comes down to simple fundamentals that have long been staples of political science: vested interests, checks and balances. The vested interests in this case are the teachers unions, which are by far the most powerful groups in the politics of education. And their power is magnified by the American system of checks and balances—which, quite by design, creates veto points that make it exceedingly difficult for reformers to get major new legislation passed and correspondingly easy for opponents to block. The teachers unions have been masters of the politics of blocking for the past quarter century. Major reform is threatening to their vested interests in the existing system, and they have used their formidable power—leveraged by checks and balances—to repel, weaken, and render ineffective the efforts of reformers to bring real change. This is the basic story of the modern reform era. The rest is detail.

What’s so important about teachers’ working conditions? The fatal flaw in North American educational reform

Teaching conditions have been an enduring concern for North American teachers for over a century. This paper explores this phenomenon by tracing how teaching conditions have been understood by decision makers and in educational research over time. It draws on historical research on the formation of mass public education systems to consider why the conditions teachers identify as critical to their work have been so persistently ignored by policy makers and researchers. Then we review the major ways that teaching conditions have been understood to matter in educational research, focusing first on psychological understandings about the relationship between working conditions and teacher motivation and then on the organizational factors teachers identify as critical to their sense of efficacy and job satisfaction. These two conceptualizations, however, are limited in their explanatory power because they are embedded in a bureaucratic framework where teachers are understood primarily as implementers of policy decisions made by their organizational superiors. Attempting to understand the full power of teaching conditions requires a more comprehensive understanding of teaching and learning processes closer to the ground. We provide descriptions of teachers’ work emerging from a recent study in order to demonstrate the close and reciprocal relationships between teaching conditions and students’ opportunities to learn.

Montessori and the Mainstream: A Century of Reform on the Margins

Background/Context Montessori education has flourished as an alternative approach to schooling for a hundred years. In the century since the first Montessori school opened in the slums of Rome, the movement has undergone sustained growth while simultaneously enduring efforts to modify the method in order to reach a wider audience. Despite Montessori's endurance and reach, the movement remains largely unstudied by educational researchers. This article presents a historical treatment of the method and the movement by treating Montessori as a case study of enduring and ambitious educational reform. Purpose/Objective This article is an examination of the American Montessori movement as it has evolved over the course of the past one hundred years. Situated within an international context, the study traces the development of the movement from its failed introduction to the United States in 1991, to its rebirth in the 1960s, to its current resurgence as a time-tested alternative to conventional public schooling. Key questions revolve around Montessori's ongoing status as an influential yet marginal force in American educational reform. Research Design This is a historical case study drawn from archival data, interviews with Montessori leaders and practitioners, and secondary sources (biographies, memoirs) generated between 1906 and 2007.

School choice and the future of American democracy

Exposes deep contradictions in the polities of American educational reform Much of the debate over school choice has focused on how voucher systems and charter schools affect the quality of public education. But should American education really be subjected to market forces? What is the significance of this decision for American democracy? The great hope of the school choice movement is that the introduction of market forces will make for more efficient and responsive public educational institutions. Parents become customers, and public schools become firms that compete for these customers on the open market. But, as Scott Abernathy crucially reminds us, parents are much more than customers. They are also citizens who help shape educational policy at bake sales and budget meetings, in teacher conferences and political campaigns. Abernathy challenges the assumption that public schools will necessarily improve when subjected to market-based reforms, raising instead the alarming possibility that such changes will produce a national anti-system of isolated and disconnected schools. School Choice and the Future of American Democracy shows how school choice breaks open the boundaries of a once-closed system, allowing the parents who are most involved in their children's education to leave the public schools for private or charter institutions. Poor schools are most hurt by this drain of civic engagement. When we privatize the customer relationship in education, we risk privatizing the very foundations of our citizenship.

Rationing Education in an Era of Accountability

MEET Mrs. Dewey, 46 years old a veteran fourth-grade teacher at Marshall Elementary School. Mrs. Dewey entered the teaching profession in the wake of A Nation at Risk has weathered the storm ever since. For the last 20 years, she has survived the continuous succession of faddish programs that has characterized American education reform. Year after year, administrators have asked Marshall teachers to alter their practice to conform to the latest theory. Mrs. Dewey's colleagues, frustrated by the implementation of such silver-bullet approaches, have often flouted the administrative directives chosen instead to serve as the sole arbiters of their classroom practice. But it is the newest of the new solutions that worries Mrs. Dewey most. The language of accountability is swift uncompromising: hold educators responsible for results. Identify those teachers who, as President Bush says, teach. Fair enough, Mrs. Dewey thinks. The consummate professional, Mrs. Dewey always looks for the silver lining. Like other reforms, accountability requires teachers to embrace a new strategy. Data-driven decision making, a consultant told the faculty at a professional development session, is the philosophy Marshall teachers must adopt. The theory is simple. Give students regular benchmark assessments; use the data to identify individual students' weaknesses; provide targeted instruction support that addresses those areas. Mrs. Dewey remembers nodding approvingly. After all, this approach--gathering textured information on each student to guide instructional activities--was one she had been using for 22 years. The consultant moved on. Using the data, you can identify focus on the kids who are close to passing. The bubble kids. And focus on the kids that count--the ones that show up at Marshall after October won't count toward the school's test scores this year. Because you don't have enough special education students to disaggregate scores for that group, don't worry about them either. To make this concept tangible for teachers, the consultant passed out markers in three colors: green, yellow, red. Mrs. Dewey heard someone mutter, What is this? The traffic light theory of education? Take out your classes' latest benchmark scores, the consultant told them, and divide your students into three groups. Color the 'safe cases,' or kids who will definitely pass, green. Now, here's the most important part: identify the kids who are 'suitable cases for treatment.' Those are the ones who can pass with a little extra help. Color them yellow. Then, color the kids who have no chance of passing this year the kids that don't count--the 'hopeless cases'--red. You should focus your attention on the yellow kids, the bubble kids. They'll give you the biggest return on your investment. As the bell tolls a final warning to the boisterous 9-year-olds bringing up the rear of her class line, Mrs. Dewey stares blankly into the hallway. Never did she believe that the advice offered by that consultant would become Marshall's educational mantra. Focus on the bubble kids. Tutor only these students. Pay more attention to them in class. Why? It's data-driven. Yet this is what her colleagues have been doing, Marshall's scores are up. The community is proud, the principal has been anointed one of the most promising educational leaders in the state. At every faculty meeting, the principal presents a league table, ranking teachers by the percentage of their students passing the latest benchmark test. And the teachers talk, as they always do. The table makes perfect fodder for faculty room gossip: Did you see who was at the bottom of the table this month? Mrs. Dewey has made compromises, both large small, throughout her career. Every educator who's in it for the long haul must. But this institutionalized policy of educational triage weighs heavily hurts more. …

Neoliberal Collusion or Strategic Simultaneity? On Multiple Rationales for Language-In-Education Policies

This article responds to Petrovic’s (2005, Language Policy, 4(4)) critique of justifications for language policy implied by Ruiz’s 1984 tripartite conceptualization of language as problem, right, or resource. Based on current literature in American policy analysis, federalism, and educational reform, I argue that articulation of multiple rationales for language policy is strategically essential because opportunities for action arise unpredictably. As with educational reform generally, adequate rationales for effective and socially just language policies must recognize the moral, as well as material aspects of education, and must, additionally, instantiate awareness of noncognitive as well as cognitive dimensions of educational goals and processes. Only by recognizing these separate influences on the climate of American public opinion and, further, by linking them with an array of programmatic and pedagogical alternatives can scholars contribute to the ongoing challenges of building effective language programs on a comprehensive intellectual foundation.