Segregated schools are back with a vengeance, according to the Harvard-based editors, the director and assistant director of the project that conducted these powerful case studies. The 1954 US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education was, Orfield and Eaton assert, doomed to failure from the outset; although it outlawed school segregation and laid the foundations for challenges to racial and ethnic discrimination in other areas of American life, it ``failed to spell out, either in educational or numerical terms, what successful desegregation should look like.'' The result, they continue, has been divisive strategies for desegregation, such as school busing programs, accompanied by white flight to the suburbs, district gerrymandering, and other attempts to get around the Court's decision. Subsequent rulings have weakened Brown v. Board of Education's intent. Notably, the editors remark, in 1990 the Supreme Court affirmed the idea of ``unitary status,'' giving lower courts extensive power over deciding whether individual school boards had made good-faith efforts to provide equal educational opportunities within their jurisdictions. Thanks to that decision and others like it, Orfield and Eaton suggest, ``the road to resegregation or at least away from desegregation seemed to be wide open''; one such road is the creation of ``magnet schools,'' in which academically gifted students—usually white or Asian—are offered `` `schools within schools,' meaning that students in the magnet program have little or no contact with students in the comprehensive, nonmagnet program.'' The editors convincingly argue that the ideal of desegregation is disappearing as the Supreme Court, led in several recent cases by Clarence Thomas, chooses the path of judicial avoidance by claiming that segregation is the result of demographic shifts that the courts have no ability to counteract. Down this road, Orfield and Eaton maintain, lies the promise of further ``urban apartheid,'' and steadily narrowing opportunities for minority students.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-56584-305-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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