Someone has to fail : the zero-sum game of public schooling / David F. Labaree.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Labaree, David F., 1947-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Educational change--United States.

Educational change.

Public schools--United States.

Public schools.

Students with social disabilities--United States.

Students with social disabilities.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (312 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

'Someone Has to Fail' looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, & never changing much.

What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children-but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way "this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do." Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult. At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes-to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own. Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.

Contents:

From citizens to consumers

Founding the American school system

The progressive effort to reshape the system

Organizational resistance to reform

Classroom resistance to reform

Failing to solve social problems

The limits of school learning

Living with the school syndrome.

Notes:

Originally published: 2010.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674265240

0674265246

9780674058866

0674058860

OCLC:

709593063