A heartfelt and ambitious look at education reform hampered by methodology limitations.
A work offers a critical evaluation of the shortcomings of public schools in the United States.
In this education policy book, Kugushev (Immigrants in Their Own Voice, 2012, etc.) compares attributes of successful and unsuccessful high schools around the country in an effort to identify the factors that contribute to college and career readiness and to suggest winning strategies. The author sees a lack of parental involvement and a culture that places a low value on intellectual development as the key factors limiting student achievement (“At a mass level, our culture is rooted in earlier times and acquiesces to educational mediocrity without giving it much thought”). The volume divides schools into “nimble mouses” and “ponderous elephants,” using the animal metaphors to highlight common characteristics. After capsule descriptions of several dozen schools in each category, Kugushev moves to solutions, offering proposals for improved teacher training, increased professionalization, expanded parental outreach, and reallocation of funding. Recommendations include a de-emphasis on or elimination of athletic programs, training parents to be effective partners in their children’s education, and expanding and enhancing guidance counseling. The book’s analysis of school qualities is somewhat limited: Kugushev uses Advanced Placement tests as a proxy for college readiness, with no mention of actual college entrance rates, and conclusions drawn from school websites about parental involvement and local culture stretch credibility (“McClymonds’s meaningless website signals the utter hopelessness of some inner-city environments). In addition, broader issues are ignored (“absence of parental engagement” is blamed for low performance in Flint, Michigan, while the city’s ongoing water crisis makes no appearance). The author includes schools’ racial statistics “with great reluctance,” and the hesitancy shows in the lack of engagement with the history of discrimination in public education and in clumsy language (“Why, in a mainstream white community, do only one-third take readiness tests?”; “Uninvolved, low-income black parents presumably define truly poor schools”). There is also no discussion of the impact of special education, with its substantial effect on both policy and funding.
A heartfelt and ambitious look at education reform hampered by methodology limitations.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5397-8515-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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