Richard F. Elmore
Harvard Graduate School of Education
How can good educational practice move beyond pockets of excellence to reach a much greater proportion of students and educators? While many children and young adults in school districts and communities around the country have long benefited from the tremendous accomplishments of successful teachers, schools, and programs, replicating this success on a larger scale has proven to be a difficult and vexing issue. In this article, Richard Elmore addresses this problem by analyzing the role of school organization and incentive structures in thwarting large-scale adoption of innovative practices close to the "core" of educational practice. Elmore then reviews evidence from two attempts at large-scale reform in the past--the progressive movement and the National Science Foundation curriculum reform projects--to evaluate his claims that ambitious large-scale school reform efforts, under current conditions, will be ineffective and transient. He concludes with four detailed recommendations for addressing the issue of scale in improving practice in education.
Brian Powell, Indiana University
Lala Carr Steelman, University of South Carolina
Twelve years ago, Brian Powell and Lala Carr Steelman analyzed state SAT scores in a landmark article in the Harvard Educational Review. At the time, politicians and the media, among others, had been using raw state SAT scores to make inferences about the relative quality of education among the U.S. states. Powell and Steelman, however, found that more than 80 percent of the variation in average state SAT scores could be attributed to the percentage of students in a state taking the test--in other words, in states where the percentage of students taking the SAT was low, state SAT averages tended to be high because that test-taking population included a high proportion of high-achieving students, and vice-versa. Since the percentage of students taking the SAT was not necessarily linked to the quality of education in a given state, Powell and Steelman cautioned against using unadjusted state SAT averages to evaluate educational quality.
In this article, Powell and Steelman revisit the subject of state SAT scores, providing an update on how state SAT scores continue to be used and misused in public deliberation over the last decade, reanalyzing interstate variation in SAT scores using contemporary data, and extending their analysis to investigate variation among state ACT scores. Powell and Steelman conclude by reaffirming their earlier position that state rankings based on SAT scores change dramatically once they have been adjusted for factors such as the participation rate or the class rank of the student test-taking population. In addition, despite the claims of some researchers and policymakers that money does not make much difference in terms of student achievement, Powell and Steelman find that public expenditures are positively related to state SAT and ACT performance.
The New London Group
In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment.
Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA
In this article, Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna examine the political struggles associated with detracking reform. Drawing on their three-year study of ten racially and socioeconomically mixed schools that are implementing detracking reform, the authors take us beyond the school walls to better understand the broad social forces that influence detracking reform. They focus specifically on the role of elite parents and how their political and cultural capital enables them to influence and resist efforts to dismantle or lessen tracking in their children's schools. Wells and Serna identify four strategies employed by elite parents to undermine and co-opt reform initiatives designed to alter existing tracking structures. By framing elite parents' actions within the literature on elites and cultural capital, the authors provide a deeper understanding of the barriers educators face in their efforts to detrack schools.
Jana Nidiffer
School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
edited by Bill Puka.
New York: Garland, 1994. 7 volumes, 2,784 pp. $454.00.
Bill Puka, a professor at Rensselaer Institute, has compiled over one hundred articles and commentaries into a seven-volume compendium of moral development literature touching on a variety of approaches, but focusing centrally around the cognitive-developmental tradition of Lawrence Kohlberg. Although many different opinions are represented in the collection, including an entire volume on criticism, the central task of the compendium seems to be to trace the evolution of Kohlberg's conception of moral development and present a wide range of subsequent research and debate based on his theoretical approach and findings.
Editor Puka begins his introduction to this series by defining his vision of the field of moral development, saying the field "focuses most on how we think about these ethical issues (using our cognitive competencies) and how we act as a result" (vol. 1, p. vii). Puka's framing of the field of moral development in this way is telling, and characterizes both the vision that guides this compendium and the Kohlbergian approach that it sets out to illuminate. To situate this compendium within the history of the field of moral development, I will address both of Puka's assertions made in the statement above. I agree with Puka's suggestion that the mainstream of the moral development field has been, and remains, largely dominated by Kohlberg's cognitive-developmental model. This model focuses on "cognitive competencies" to the exclusion of other aspects of moral experience, such as emotions and passions, empathy, self-knowledge, personal relationships, and various forms of identity. As this compendium attests, much of the energy of the moral development field in the last twenty-five years has been dedicated to Kohlberg's theory, either in support and refinement or in criticism and challenge.
Despite this, it is hardly fair to suggest, as Puka does, that Kohlberg's theoretical approach, in itself, constitutes "the field" of moral development. The non-Kohlbergian articles in this compendium deal with aspects of moral experience other than cognitive development, and even these articles do not adequately represent all the approaches and concerns within the moral development field. These critical essays speak clearly and forcefully of the need to transcend Kohlberg's narrow definition of morality as a particular form of liberal justice, and to reconceptualize moral experience as more than an abstract form of justice reasoning.
Puka's second assertion is that Kohlberg's focus and measurement of cognitive competencies leads us to understand "how we act as a result." This contention seems to me to rest on even shakier ground. It suggests that Kohlberg's theory bridges the chasm between ideal moral thought and actual moral action; that is, that a particular Kohlberg "stage" of moral development (an individual's cognitive moral capacity) will determine to a large extent how a person will respond in an actual moral dilemma. To my knowledge, this link between cognitive competencies and moral action has never been established, and remains a major weakness in the approach, a point raised by more than one of the critics included in this series. Since Kohlberg's theory leaves out other aspects of human experience that are commonly cited as important contributors to moral agency -- such as compassion, empathy, sensitivity, and emotional responsiveness -- it seems unlikely that this approach will ever be able to clarify the relationship between moral thought and moral action. As Puka himself acknowledges:
At higher levels, sophisticated moral reasoning can weave brilliantly self-deceptive rationalizations, ideal for hypocrisy. It not only weaves paths around responsibilities, but helps us feel justified in avoiding them. (vol. 7, p. xi)
Despite these and other problems with the Kohlbergian approach, his theory and the research it has generated must be carefully considered. This series serves the purpose of collecting articles both illustrative of and critical of Kohlberg's central moral developmental claims, and offers historical perspectives explicating this important part of the field.
Moral Development: A Compendium is organized into seven volumes as follows: volume one includes Kohlberg's explication of his theory and a smattering of alternative approaches to understanding moral development; volume two contains research and retheorizing by Kohlberg's followers; volume three reprints Kohlberg's 1956 dissertation, the original study on which he built his theory. Volume four, entitled The Great Justice Debate, consists of criticisms of Kohlberg's theory that focus on the philosophical inadequacy and culturally biased nature of Kohlberg's conception of morality as a particular liberal conception of justice; volume five provides new research in the cognitive developmental tradition; and volume six focuses on critiques of Kohlberg's theory, especially that of Carol Gilligan and other researchers who focus on the "different voice" of the "care" moral orientation. The final volume of the series presents articles that explore important aspects of human experience relevant to moral development -- aggression, forgiveness, altruism, empathy, moral emotions, sense of responsibility, guilt, virtues, and education -- that Puka calls "the most powerful motivators of action, emotional needs and feelings" (p. xi). The research offered in volume seven neither constitutes a separate approach in itself, nor is it coordinated theoretically in relation to the central Kohlbergian paradigm. Unfortunately, there is little commentary throughout the compendium addressing the similarities and differences among Kohlberg's perspectives and the other views included, a void that in many ways replicates the situation in the field in which theorists of various and potentially contradictory perspectives rarely engage in dialogue.
Edmund Sullivan suggests in volume four that the historical importance of Kohlberg's legacy is situated in what his theory purported to offer to the social sciences in the aftermath of World War II and in response to social unrest:
As the sixties decried the "value-free" emptiness of the social sciences, Kohlberg's theory entered the scene as knight in shining armor. In a culture deeply involved in moral problems related to race, poverty, and war, this theory offered a concept of justice which promised to deal with the quagmire of value relativity. (vol. 4, p. 47)
Kohlberg's legacy, however, while well-meaning, has failed for a number of reasons to fulfill the promise of giving our society an understanding of morality, moral experience, and moral development that adequately supports moral growth or illuminates moral action. In his own article, Puka observes that:
[Kohlberg] decided that a particular philosophical tradition had defined the scope and adequacy of morality best. Then he set its view up as a some- what a priori standard for moral psychology and development. (vol. 4, p. 375)
Kohlberg chose as his guiding principle the preordained limiting of morality to that which is articulated and recognized by the Kantian form of liberal justice. This conceptualization of morality has serious consequences because it defines as irrelevant huge portions of what is commonly recognized to be within the moral domain. The aspects of moral experience that remain -- abstract justice reasoning -- then dictate a methodology for assessment that only serves to reaffirm the belief that moral judgment is strictly cognitive in nature. As Stranghan states:
Kohlberg's methodology, by its very nature, virtually equates moral agency with the making of judgments about hypothetical ethical dilemmas, and this orient- ation must impose severe limitations on what he can say about morality proper and the real-life business of moral decision-making. (vol. 4, p. 171)
It is also observed that there is an element of cultural bias and ethnocentricity in Kohlberg's hierarchy of moral reasoning, where reasoning is defined as the rational application of abstract principles of justice and equality, something not valued or practiced equally across cultures (Simpson, vol. 4, p. 19). Even within our own cultural tradition, there are myriad philosophies and perspectives on what is right and good, and no simple, unequivocal hierarchy has ever been agreed upon. Citing Alasdair MacIntyre's philosophical work After Virtue, Richard Schweder argues in volume four that:
if MacIntyre is right, diverse moral philosophies (e.g. Kohlberg's "stages") do not line up along some Jacob's ladder ascending to the rational recognition of the inalienable rights of man. Instead, diverse moral philosophies are coexisting and incommensurate points, and to adopt any one philosophy (e.g. stage six individual rights over stage five social utility over stage four virtue) is merely to assert one's personal or collective preference. (vol. 4, p. 72)
While Kohlberg's work at least addresses cultural issues, it does not manifest an awareness of possible effects of socioeconomic class within our own society, Sullivan argues. Kohlberg, he says, like many of his predecessors in the liberal tradition, does not take account of "the blindness produced by one's place in the social structure" (vol. 4, p. 67).
The other main issue of debate in this compendium is how to understand the role of gender in moral development. Gender has a complex relationship to every aspect of moral experience because the social construction of gender affects and defines socialization patterns, social role expectations, and differing gender identities with their attendant values, priorities, vulnerabilities, and ideologies. Despite an abundance of research, theorizing, and critical commentary on the role of gender in Kohlberg's research, the articles included in these volumes neither put to rest the so-called "Kohlberg-Gilligan debate" nor substantially clarify its terms. This is, at least in part, because the reader is left wondering if the two parties to this debate are speaking to each other. Gilligan's critique of Kohlberg's position and research go well beyond the familiar claim that his research protocol and scoring, having been normed on a male sample, discriminated against females. While evidence is presented by Walker suggesting that females can do as well as males on Kohlberg's revised methodology (vol. 6), Gilligan's broader critique of Kohlberg's masculinist worldview -- emphasizing Kohlberg's hierarchical ordering of abstract principles, the irrelevance (or tainting effect) of emotion and personal relationship, and radical, self-defined autonomy and individualism -- challenge central features of Kohlberg's approach. Kohlberg, however, seemed not to even feel the need to defend these concepts so foundational to his paradigm.
Despite many devastating criticisms of Kohlberg's approach, no one has yet offered a broad-ranging alternative. Students of moral development will find this compendium useful for providing both a rich background of Kohlberg's successes and several critiques of the failures and oversights in his paradigm and methodology. Much of the criticism in this series suggests that we must reconceptualize moral experience, and holistically combine the rational with the passionate, interpersonal understanding with personal integrity, personal history with social context. Until we move beyond a simplistic understanding of moral experience and a rigid definition of moral development, we can hardly hope to comprehend, let alone articulate, the best ways to nurture moral selves and moral communities with a sense of agency to respond morally in their lives -- the central goal and measure of any moral development theory.
S.A.S.
by Burton R. Clark.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 284 pp. $40.00.
Places of Inquiry is the second part of a two-volume study that compares the history and current status of research and advanced education in modern industrial nations. Following The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan, which Burton Clark also edited, this second volume is the result of Clark's analysis of extensive empirical evidence on national systems of academic research and advanced education gathered in fieldwork conducted by Clark and his collaborators abroad. In Places of Inquiry, Clark moves beyond the detailed country-based studies of Western patterns of education and research offered in Research Foundations. He analyzes changes over time in the configuration or composition of national research systems, sets up a typology of systems, then identifies current cross-national trends, problems, and future possibilities.
Clark divides his book into two parts. Readers who like education history and wish to understand more about the origins of research universities will be particularly interested in Part One of this book. In Part One, drawing on a set of research questions carefully articulated in his introduction, Clark describes the evolution of the German university idea and its descendent, the German academic institute. Clark's description of the nineteenth-century German model of research and its profound influence on advanced education in other nations is informative and adds new insights to the literature on higher education issues. Clark argues that pedagogy was an integral part of the ideology underlying the classic German model, and then shows how, in practice, academicians of that era quickly veered away from training their advanced students in the broad humanistic and pragmatic concerns embodied in the original principle to emphasize disciplinary specialization and the investigative method. For Clark, what is important about the nineteenth-century German university idea is that it "established as an enduring principle the idea of a unity of research, teaching, and study" (p. 1). Its imperatives united the various empirical sciences through philosophy, and tied them to general upbringing and universal enlightenment so strongly that "the Berlin doctrine of 1810 in all its fullness was actually a variant of what is now called liberal education" (p. 22).
Despite transformations across nations and time, the framework for this unity still has great symbolic power. It is still evident in the modern-day German system, and prevalent in U.S. graduate school training. Even in France, "institutional responses that protect and enhance research and research training have been evolving over several decades" (p. 113). It is therefore possible, Clark believes, to renew models of advanced education based on an understanding of inquiry or research as a foundation for teaching and study rather than on the concept of "education through inquiry and freedom of teaching and research linked to ... ever increasing specialization that found its way into advanced training in universities everywhere" (p. 26).
Clark gives equal attention in Part One to the characteristics of advanced training and research in Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Clark stresses the historical and contemporary primacy in Britain of the aristocratic undergraduate Oxbridge residential college over graduate study, Britain's historical tendencies to homogenize the organization of research across institutions within small academic departments, chronic funding problems, and the characteristic British approach to advanced training as "a B.A. plus some research time" (p. 79). Clark decries the configuration of French universities: inferior in both status and resources, universities in France are subordinate to the elite but publicly supported grandes ecoles that select, train, and place researchers, while another sector, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), is responsible for government-funded research. The Japanese system suffers from Japanese industry's domination of higher education as the site for research and research training; doctorates are acquired without coursework and graduate education lacks "sturdy research underpinnings" (p. 191).
The graduate school is an American invention. The output of Ph.D.'s in the United States is comparatively huge, but the vast majority of colleges and universities are undergraduate-centered and oriented towards teaching (p. 11). U.S. graduate schools have prospered, according to Clark, because the research realm is a massively differentiated sector; some fifty to one hundred institutions exist in which the German university idea has evolved to its modern day generic form of the "graduate department university."
In Part Two, Clark argues that the universal problem facing research and advanced learning institutions in the future is "drift." In Germany, professors move research and an elite core of students out of the university context to alternative and far-flung sites. Advanced study is "curriculum poor" and "relatively unsystematized" (p. 55). In the United States, where teaching drift is most acute in Clark's view, mass access to postsecondary education causes certain institutions, programs within universities, graduate departments, degree levels, and even personnel to be removed from research. According to Clark, most master's degree and professional-degree students in the United States are neither trained for nor involved in research. Nevertheless, Clark identifies conditions in higher education that "counter fragmentation and uphold integration" (p. 192) of the research-teaching-study nexus and offer hope for change: differentiation of institutions into research and nonresearch sectors, which permits concentration on both research and advanced education; institutional competition and the drive for research-based prestige; modern-day versions of the unity principle that insist on training grounded in research; and, most importantly, separate instruction at the graduate level supported with flexible funding.
Overall, faculty and administrators in higher education concerned with training advanced students, as well as those generally concerned with higher education policy, should find Clark's approach to the imperatives of teaching and research refreshing. Unlike those contemporary critics of higher education in the United States who would reform undergraduate education by reducing the emphasis on research and research training, Clark proposes a model of modern higher education in which research, teaching, and student learning are compatible and complementary.
M. G. C.
edited by Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994. 266 pp. $59.95.
In this collection of seven essays about the teaching and learning of history, editors Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel Beck, and Catherine Stainton present research in the form of case studies that blend a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods in a range of educational settings from elementary school through the university. The various authors examine history texts and textbooks, the development of historical understanding, and views on the nature of history from the perspectives of students, teachers, and historians.
In the first chapter, Margaret McKeown and Isabel Beck undertake an analysis of history textbooks to establish whether they promote understanding of ideas rather than the mere ingestion of facts. The authors question whether students are able to make connections between concepts in the text in order to build a representation of the topic. The authors contend that the history texts they examined did not develop students' understanding of the interrelationships among historical events. The texts also assumed far more background knowledge than the students actually possessed.
Their study provides food for thought for text writers and for teachers who might be textbook reliant. By creating more stimulating versions of the text, teachers can depose the authority of the textbook and make students and themselves legitimate sources of knowledge. The authors maintain that written language needs to be "energized" in order to engage learners, and they suggest alternative methods to help students build their own understandings of history.
In a study set in a Swedish classroom, discussed in chapter two, Ola Hallden focuses on one such method for getting students engaged in historical inquiry. In the instructional method Hallden reviews, known simply as "classroom conversation," the teacher and students try to achieve a "shared line of reasoning" that is directed by the teacher but engages the student in dialogue.
M. Anne Britt, Jean-Francois Rouet, Mara Georgi, and Charles Perfetti take the analysis of history texts further in their chapter "Learning from History Texts: From Causal Analysis to Argument Models." These authors, too, contend that most history texts provide simple narratives that do not acknowledge the controversies surrounding historical topics. For example, in a comparative study of fifth-grade history textbooks and texts from published history books, they found simplistic accounts that often failed to convey to students that the story could only be partly known from the indirect sources available to the writers, and that different, probably contradictory versions of the same story could exist. The authors hold that if students were able to work with many sources, they could learn to distinguish biases in the text by constructing argument models that look at conflicting claims and the evidence used to support them.
An important chapter in this volume is Samuel Wineburg's "Cognitive Representation of Historical Texts" (ch. 4), in which he comments on the nature of historical inquiry and what historians do. Wineburg argues that "the writing of history is itself an act that reflects human authorship and is fraught with human concern" (p. 89). He endorses the view that language imposes a point of view or a particular perspective, and therefore cannot be neutral. Past events are not available for inspection and must be imaginatively reconstructed. Historians have to draw inferences and conclusions that, although based on the evidence available to them, are inevitably colored by their personal knowledge, skills, beliefs, experiences, convictions, and assumptions. The language of the text must therefore be closely examined for words and phrases that reveal elements of this. Wineburg's research with a group of historians attempting to represent events from a body of documentary evidence provides insight into the way historians grapple with documents that invite a variety of responses and interpretations. By making students aware of these processes, students learn to challenge and critique history texts.
This is precisely the subject of chapter five, "Students as Authors," in which Stuart Greene investigates how college-level students construct meaning from sources and then compares their understanding of historical writing with that of historians confronted with the same tasks. Results from the study indicated that students were insecure about the use of their own ideas, and ambivalent about where to place them within the context of other authorities' work. This study emphasized the impact of teachers' conceptions of history on their classroom teaching and its influence on their students' ideas of history.
In chapter six, "Educational Ideologies and the Teaching of History," Ronald Evans sets up five broad typologies of history teachers on the basis of a dominant tendency in one or the other mode of instruction: storyteller, scientific historian, relativist/reformer, cosmic philosopher, or eclectic (p. 178). The categories are not meant to be mutually exclusive and the characterizations will probably be recognizable to many students of history.
In the final chapter, "History: A Time to Be Mindful," Leinhardt draws together the previous chapters' discussions. She echoes the view of history as multi-layered and complex, a story of change: "Students need to understand the nature of historical ambiguity, follow convergences and diversions, and understand the limitations on perspective that the present imposes on us. . . . Such understanding represents mindful engagement with the content" (p. 240). In a chapter rich with documented research, Leinhardt makes powerful statements about history teaching and calls on teachers to be both flexible and dynamic in their thinking and classroom practice.
In conclusion, Teaching and Learning in History represents an important resource that can help teachers to formulate and articulate more clearly their ideas about history and classroom practice.
D. M. Z.
edited by Susan Albers Mohrman and Priscilla Wohlstetter.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994. 302 pp. $34.95.
School-Based Management probes one possible reason why popular school decentralization efforts have met with limited success in improving schools. The authors argue that the current school-based management (SBM) discussion has focused primarily on the political process of school governance and the transfer of power from central to local actors and not on the broader organizational design process. Policymakers, practitioners, and scholars interested in the application of school-based management for educational improvement will find this book useful in reconceptualizing the role decentralization plays in systemic school reform.
School-Based Management grew out of school decentralization research conducted by the Finance Center of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), but represents a product of the collaboration between CPRE and the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO). The editors are Susan Albers Mohrman, senior research scientists at the Center for Effective Organizations, and Priscilla Wohlstetter, associate professor at the University of Southern California and senior research fellow with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. The editors use high-involvement, an organizational model drawn from the private sector, as a lens through which contributors are asked to reflect on school-based management. High-involvement management, a set of organizational principles originally conceived by Edward Lawler, is defined here as the "alter[ation of] the logic of the organization so that there is a less distinct demarcation between the work that produces the products or delivers the services and the work of developing strategies and plans, allocating resources, and controlling performance" (p. 9). Its application to schools lies in the rethinking of SBM as part of a long-term, complex process of systemic educational reform that includes decentralization of not only power, but also of knowledge, skills, information, and rewards.
The book is organized into two sections. The first section is descriptive, the second prescriptive. Throughout, contributors use the high-involvement framework as an analytic lens to explore school-based management and other approaches to school improvement. The first chapters summarize the high-involvement model and review school-based management research. A later chapter looks at four well-known approaches to improving school performance -- Effective Schools, the School Development Program, Accelerated Schools, and Essential Schools -- in terms of their intersections with the high-involvement model. Subsequent chapters examine teacher professionalism and SBM, as well as the recent charter school phenomenon, which is explored as an example of extreme school decentralization. This first section concludes with a discussion of the power of SBM as a catalyst for school reform. Whereas SBM "creates the conditions where school-site participants can bring about changes in performance" (p. 167), the authors also caution that more than a shift in governance is necessary to bring about dramatic improvement in school practice. Redistribution of decisionmaking authority needs to be coupled with access to extensive information at all levels of the organization, professional development, and implementation of performance-based incentives.
The second section of the book includes an examination of the process of change needed to implement fully a high-involvement model in schools. It begins with an exploration of three frameworks useful for conceptualizing change. The following chapters review the past two decades of literature on change in schools and locate SBM as part of large-scale educational change.
The book concludes with a reminder that SBM should not be narrowly conceived as simply a change in school governance, but that "SBM needs to be viewed as the redesign of the school organization" that "allow[s] for many modes of involvement, beyond single-site councils. . . . SBM should not be seen as an isolated intervention; rather, it should be part of a more systemic set of changes that include the introduction of new approaches to teaching and learning" (pp. 269-270). The authors call for the redesign of schools into high-involvement organizations, noting that this transition will involve ongoing learning on the part of all stakeholders, as school communities find ways to forge connections between SBM, organizational design, and school improvement.
J. B.
by Susan McAllister Swap.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1993. 213 pp. $48.00, $17.95 (paper).
In Developing Home-School Partnerships: From Concepts to Practice, Susan Swap provides a practical and comprehensive guide addressing the barriers to and the development of meaningful partnerships between families and schools. Before her untimely death from brain cancer in July 1995, Swap was a professor of education and psychology at Wheelock College in Boston, and the director of the school's center on Families, Communities, Schools, and Children's Learning. Drawing upon her extensive experience and knowledge in the area of family and school relations, Swap provides both theoretical scaffolding into the subject of family-school relations and clear, practical suggestions for the development of these important partnerships.
The book is organized into two sections. In the first section, which encompasses chapters 1-4, Swap provides a comprehensive summary of the literature that links family involvement in schools with benefits such as increased student achievement and attainment, increased student self-esteem, fewer behavioral problems in school, and better school attendance. Along with a discussion of three major literature reviews, Swap also provides details of specific research studies on the effects of parental involvement at the preschool, elementary, and secondary school levels, such as the Perry Preschool longitudinal study and the Project Hope study.
The first section also focuses on a central paradox of family-school relations: even though both teachers and parents agree that more home-school interaction is beneficial for children's learning, parental involvement in schools is surprisingly minimal. In an attempt to unravel the paradox, Swap discusses four barriers to full family-school partnerships: the ever-changing demographics of the families and children being served by the schools; the lack of school norms and culture that support partnerships; the lack of resources to support parent involvement; and the lack of information about how to start and maintain parental involvement programs.Swap ends the first section of the text with the development of a conceptual framework of home-school interactions. This framework consists of four models: the "protective model," which aims to protect the schools from parents; the "school-to-home transition model," in which the goal is to enlist parents to support the objectives of the school; the "curriculum enrichment model," where the goal is to expand and extend the school's curriculum by incorporating the contributions of families; and the "partnership model," where schools encourage an alliance between parents and educators. Swap suggests that the choice of home-school model depends on the values of the families and educators and the needs of the children, but recommends the partnership model for schools with declining student performance, a heterogeneous school population, and a lack of agreement among families and educators about the definition of success in school, and the characteristics of children and schools that contribute to that success.
Swap describes the second section, chapters 5-12, as the "how-to" portion of the book, as it offers a variety of approaches and practices to help educators develop and implement home-school partnership programs. Swap offers her suggestions not as ideal prescriptions for the development of these partnerships, but as ideas "to prepare school personnel and parents to initiate discussion, make choices, adapt suggestions, and set a realistic time-table for implementation" (p. 62). Throughout this section, Swap uses actual cases and personal experiences to bring to life her examples of useful practices.
A notable element of Developing Home-School Partnerships is the extent to which Swap emphasizes the need for schools to reach out and make room for parents of different ethnic, racial, language, and class backgrounds. In both sections of the book, Swap provides valuable insights for those attempting to build strong connections between families from diverse backgrounds and schools. Overall, the text offers an abundance of information for researchers, policymakers, educators from both the public and private sector, and parents interested in improving interactions between families and schools.
K. L. M.
by Patricia Gandara.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 151 pp. $14.95 (paper).
For decades, educational research on non-White students has focused on their high rates of "failure" to achieve academically. Patricia Gandara, in her new book Over the Ivy Walls: The Educational Mobility of Low-Income Chicanos, states that "our increased understanding of the factors that lead to failure has not appreciably diminished the rate of failure experienced by Chicano students" (p. 1). Gandara examines the combination of conditions that support the high level of academic achievement of the few Chicanos who do excel in school. She suggests that successful academic results are likely "the product of design rather than of accident" (p. 1), and hopes that her research will be helpful to educators and policymakers interested in school reform and the promotion of successful educational outcomes for Chicanos, as well as other minorities.
Gandara's professional experience includes years of work as a school psychologist, teacher, and researcher. As part of her work in low-income, all-minority schools, she sees students who have been referred to her because they have been labeled "at risk" of dropping out. Gandara's experiences with these students contradicts the argument made by many authors in the literature on low school achievement that high-achieving students are simply born more intelligent. Rather, Gandara finds many students who are "just as bright, and perhaps brighter" than those who go to college, but who often "take a very different path" (p. xi). This knowledge prompts Gandara to ask the questions: What caused those students who excelled in spite of these bleak circumstances to beat the odds? What would motivate some of them to go on to college and beyond?
In her research for this book, Gandara seeks answers to questions like these through her survey-like interviews of fifty Chicanos (thirty men and twenty women) who fit what Gandara refers to as "the most stringent criterion for academic success: a Ph.D., M.D., or J.D. degree conferred from a highly regarded American university of national stature" (p. 11). In talking with her research participants, Gandara concludes that some of the salient points about their experiences that set them apart from the majority of Chicanos can be analyzed in terms of contexts and relationships, such as those delineated by the book's chapters: home influences; family stories as cultural capital; schools and neighborhoods; peers; and personal attributes and individual differences. She also dedicates an entire chapter to understanding the women in her study.
Gandara's framing of both her interviews and her conclusions assumes that the primary purpose of education is economic advancement, an assumption shared by other educational theorists such as John Ogbu. In focusing on the graduate degrees that she does, Gandara also assumes that these are the most difficult degrees to attain, and therefore represent the most challenging education students could pursue. Her emphasis remains on particular students who fail or excel in academics, and on what they, or their families, have done to better their chances of school success. Gandara finds that the Chicano students with the following attributes do best at school: they have light-colored skin and European (or "ambiguous") looks; live next to White neighborhoods; attend predominantly White schools (approximately 75% of her interviewees did); are persistent; have supportive parents; have predominantly White peers; and learned to appreciate schools' values, such as competitiveness, book literacy, tracking, and standardized testing.
Gandara only considers the factors her interviewees mention when thinking about school "failure"; she does not call for a redefinition, a restructuring, or even a questioning of schools and the adaptations schools require of students. Ultimately, it appears that the few Chicano students (and their families) who do not challenge the educational system because they are willing to acculturate or can pass schools' "objective standard" (p. 94) as they "aspire to the middle class" (p. 76) might succeed in being considered "college material" (p. 120). This book might be useful to those interested in how to manage acculturation for academic success, but not to those who might propose alternative ways of defining or achieving that success.
N. H.
by Alan W. France.
Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. 171 pp. $12.95
Alan France's latest book, Composition as a Cultural Practice, raises some fundamentally important questions about both traditional and progressive writing processes and theories. The author's theories stem from his own practice on the university level, but he leaves other practitioners room to interpret his ideas in their particular situations, on whatever level their practice may fall. France, who is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Composition at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, presents a provocative and insightful critique that dissects the "instrumentalist approach" to the teaching of writing (that is, a mechanical conceptualization of writing as a basic skill), which, he argues, abstracts the idea of literacy from its cultural context, and thus from its inherently political and ideological nature. For France, "culture" represents
the dominant process of identity formation that is reproduced by American institutions (especially the schools and the popular media) and that provides the basis for generalizing about contemporary social life in this country. (p. xv)
Composition as a cultural practice, for France, is a process through which students free themselves from the dominant ideological stronghold that socializes them into maintaining or reproducing particular values, bodies of knowledge and meaning, and interests. For example, France describes "initiating students into a materialist rhetorical practice":
I begin by asking students to describe the classroom we are occupying, looking in particular for signs of power. . . . A classroom I taught in recently was particularly rich in these signs. It had once been connected by a hallway to a suite of offices, and the locked door bore two signs: "KEEP OUT" and "Authorized Personnel Only". . . . While the material artifacts of the classroom and their arrangement can be "read" as part of a system of power relations, the university campus provides a much more elaborated code of hierarchical authority. . . . Once students have practiced the rhetorical analysis of the material world they inhabit, it is time to move on to written texts. (pp. 23-24)
From an illustration of his approach to the analysis of written texts, France continues on to a discussion of the students' compositions. His emancipatory vision of writing consists of a process in which students develop a sociopolitical understanding of the realities that shape their everyday lives, and as they produce their own reading of the world and their own meaning, they realize and enact their ability to contest or "rewrite" any oppressive social practices and institutions.
In the nine chapters that comprise Composition as Cultural Practice -- with titles such as "Radical Pedagogy and Student Resistance: Can We Fight the Power?" "Teaching the Dialectics of `Objective' Discourse: A Progressive Approach to Business and Professional Writing," and "Composing a Post-Sexist Rhetoric: Introductory Writing Instruction as a Cultural Production" -- France lays out the history of introductory writing instruction, explores the possibilities of feminist theoretical frameworks into the composition classroom, and engages ways that students can learn to challenge critically the messages of popular media. He also exposes some of the dominant processes through which students are rendered apathetic and passive towards the political nature of their own social reality, neutralizing their potential for social agency and transformative action. Most important, in addressing specific pedagogical problems that occur when infusing cultural criticism into writing practices, France shares his own personal trials and tribulations in the classroom. For example, in a research project where his students reviewed excerpts from a chemical company's operating manual, France describes a situation where his conclusions "did not seem `practical' or `realistic' to [his] students when the class discussed the outcome of the research project" (pp. 71-72). However, he does note that "the dialectical approach to business writing did teach the students some things that they wouldn't have learned in a more traditional class" (p. 72). For example, they learned that the so-called "real world" is far from being "above politics," once we understand that politics is about money and power and right and wrong.
Composition as Cultural Practice convincingly argues that critical writing has to be linked to a process of democratization; that is, a process within which we become active participants both in the construction of meaning and in the articulation of our own goals and dreams. As this democratic dimension and call for political clarity is so lacking in the field of composition theory in the United States, Alan France's contribution is long overdue.
R. H. T.
by Henry Giroux.
New York: Routledge, 1996. 220 pp. $16.95 (paper).
Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth focuses on the relationship between children's culture and the ravaging cultures of racism and violence as they are produced through multiple codes and representations in diverse cultural locations. Chapter one examines how films about Black and White youth are racially coded to depict violence among White youth as an aberration, while violence among Black youth is seen as an indictment of an entire racial group. Henry Giroux addresses how such films can be used through a cultural studies paradigm to take up considerations of power, identity, and social justice as both pedagogical and political projects. In the second chapter, Giroux looks at the world of Disney animation, particularly the more recent films, and explores how children's culture is addressed through a false politics of innocence, a spurious appeal to entertainment, and the commercialization of the everyday life of children. In the third chapter, Giroux analyses the emergence of a new kind of hyper-real violence in films such as Pulp Fiction. He argues that hyper-real violence must be seen as a pedagogical practice that subordinates politics to a gritty realism, an esthetic formalism that reproduces very distinct and negative racial and sexual coded messages.
In chapter four, Giroux looks at the anti-political correctness movement, and examines its implications for teaching youth what it means to learn, become a citizen, and deal with the complexities of race. Chapter five explores the often ignored relationship between the resurgence of a new nationalism in the United States and its relationship to the politics of multiculturalism. Chapters six and seven take up the issue of what it means to be a public intellectual both in the university and in the sphere of popular culture. Giroux focuses on the latter by addressing the emergence of talk radio as a new public sphere. The last chapter concentrates on the limits and the possibilities of agency among youth by addressing the relationship between youth and "convenience store culture" and what it suggests about the future of work for many working-class kids. It also addresses how the basketball court has become the new public sphere for Black youth. Giroux investigates these issues through a critical interrogation of the films Clerks and Hoop Dreams.
This may be the most daring and best book that Giroux has written in his attempts to link pedagogy with a variety of cultural spheres. With such a thoughtful and lucid analysis of the relationship among youth, violence, and race, Fugitive Cultures is a book that every educator should read.
P. L.
edited by Anne Henderson and Nancy Berla.
Washington, DC: National Committee for Citizens in Education, 1994. 160 pp. $17.95.
Anne Henderson and Nancy Berla published the first in a series of Evidence reports in 1981. In that first report, Henderson and Berla reviewed thirty-five studies that documented positive relationships between some form of parental involvement in a child's education and measurable benefits for children, their families, and schools. In this third installment of their ongoing literature review on parental involvement, the authors state: "The evidence is now beyond dispute. When schools work together with families to support learning, children tend to succeed not just in school, but throughout life" (p. 1).
This most recent edition highlights a collection of sixty-six studies, mostly empirical in nature. The research cited includes longitudinal studies of the effects of early intervention programs with comprehensive parental components on student achievement and attainment. The authors also describe studies exploring the impact of different kinds of parental and family involvement on outcomes such as student achievement, attainment, and parents' attitudes about school. In addition, Henderson and Berla examine studies that investigate the impact of family behaviors and background on student achievement.
The authors furnish several useful ways to negotiate the text. First, an index is provided in the beginning of the book that organizes the studies, by author, into three categories: programs and interventions, family processes, and school policies. Second, the introduction includes an in-depth summation of the findings by theme, and provides a listing of the studies that deal with these topics. The format of the text is well organized and easy to navigate. Henderson and Berla provide one- to two-page summaries for each study, describing its methodology, findings, and conclusions, and include pertinent reference information such as the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) source number. This text is an important and must-have resource guide for anyone interested in or researching the topic of parental and family involvement in education.
K. L. M.
by Molly Ladd-Taylor.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 211 pp. $14.95 (paper).
Molly Ladd-Taylor explores women's contributions to child welfare legislation at the turn of the century in Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, a volume in the Women in American History series. She begins with the late nineteenth century, when maternal and child welfare first became national political concerns. Chronicling the events of welfare legislation, most notably the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, the first national welfare legislation, Ladd-Taylor analyzes women's contributions to welfare legislation through three active women's groups of the time: maternalists, progressive maternalists, and feminists. According to Ladd-Taylor, maternalists valued women's unique role in childrearing, which united all mothers, theoretically, across race and class. Maternalists typically performed community service through the extensive women's club network of the time. Progressive maternalists were also known as progressive women reformers, and include those women allied with the U.S. Children's Bureau. Feminists were those women who associated with the National Women's Party.
Carefully intertwining women's private and public work at the turn of the century, Ladd-Taylor offers a thorough analysis of legislation such as mothers' pensions, the work leading up to the 1935 Social Security Act, and the Sheppard-Towner Act. Employing the rhetoric of motherhood, women of the Progressive Period were able to enter the public sphere and affect welfare legislation. The author notes the irony that by the late 1920s, these welfare programs moved into the hands of the men and women considered "professionals," and were no longer the purview of the maternalists and their cohorts.
This book is for any scholar interested in feminist and historical research. Mother-Work contributes to the evolving definition of feminism previously developed by historians such as Nancy Cott (1987) in The Grounding of Modern Feminism and James O'Neill (1969) in Everyone Was Brave. Ladd-Taylor succeeds in providing the reader with a look at how "women's unpaid work of reproduction and caregiving" (p. 1) in both the private and public arenas has been central to the development of the U.S. political and economic systems. Ladd-Taylor joins historians Linda Gordon, Theda Skocpol, and Kathryn Kish Sklar in current scholarship on women's roles in the formation of the American welfare state.
C. A. W.
edited by Harbison Pool and Jane A. Page.
Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappan Educational Foundation, 1995. 293 pp. $35.00.
Beyond Tracking: Finding Success in Inclusive Schools, a collection of twenty-five articles and essays, provides a rationale for detracking, a set of strategies for doing so, case studies of successfully detracked schools, and some suggestions regarding successful teaching methods for heterogeneous classes.
Robert Slavin and Jomills Braddock assert in the lead article, "Why Ability Grouping Must End: Achieving Excellence and Equity in Education," that no research has yet shown that tracking results in better achievement for all students. Rather, they state, students in lower track classes perform less well than similar students in heterogeneous classes, and students in upper track classes perform no better than their counterparts in heterogeneous classes. In another essay, "Tracking and Its Effects on African Americans in the Field of Education," Jane and Fred Page note that it is no coincidence that the great increase in tracking coincided with court-ordered desegregation in U.S. schools.
It is the consensus of the contributors to this volume that issues of equity for all students in a democracy demand detracked schools. Nevertheless, detracking a school is a difficult and tricky business. Designing effective professional development to support teachers' mastery of pedagogies that work in heterogeneous classes is a complex endeavor.
Convincing parents to support detracking in a school, especially parents of the top-track students, is a daunting political task. One essay, "Untracking Your Middle School: Nine Tentative Steps Toward Long-Term Success" by Paul George, presents an example of how one middle school principal handled this situation. He allowed the parents to express their objections, then simply asked if their concerns were based on knowledge or intuition. As expected, they replied "intuition." He responded that he was using knowledge, gave them copies of the reading and the research that supported his decision to detrack, and invited them to return after they had completed the reading. None returned. Implementation of the detracking plan was carried out with no further objections.
The essays contained in this volume would form a good foundation for a school or community exploring or discussing the contentious issue of tracking and the decision to detrack a school.
B. N.
edited by Leo C. Rigsby, Maynard C. Reynolds, and Margaret C. Wang.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. 441 pp. $45.00.
Educators have long recognized the importance of the societal context within which education takes place, yet have only recently begun to explore the linking of educational, health, and social services to address the complexity of out-of-school issues that accompany children to schools. School-Community Connections is a compilation of the deliberations of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners on the integrated or collaborative services movement -- that is, the effort to connect social service agencies with schools. The contributors seek to understand and explore solutions to the complex host of issues teachers face in educating children today, particularly in urban communities, and to challenge the current delivery of education and social services.
Recognizing that educators often lack the professional expertise and that schools lack the financial resources to provide comprehensive social services to children and their families, School-Community Connections draws on the expertise of professionals from a variety of disciplines. The book's nineteen chapters summarize current theory and research on school-community linkages and include discussions about both the necessity of collaboration and barriers to its realization. The book is an essential read for any researcher, policymaker, or practitioner with an interest in the connection between schools and communities. It is a valuable resource for all those interested in the ways that the integration of school and community resources hold promise for providing effective educational services, and related health and social services, to children and their families.
J. B.
by Anne Lamott.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. 239 pp. $21.00.
Anne Lamott's irreverent and humorous approach in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is greatly inspiring for those confronted with the task of writing. She reminds us that the process of writing is messy, and that lousy drafts are common to all good writers. Lamott cautions the writer not to be obsessed with perfectionism, since the treasures in our writing are under piles of clutter: "Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move" (p. 29).
Each chapter covers a particular aspect of a piece -- from plot to dialogue -- and offers practical tips and suggestions for approaching them. Her advice for developing a character, for example, is to "ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing?" (p. 45).
Amidst Lamott's funny anecdotes, however, are deep and insightful comments about writing. "Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong" (p.19). Her wisest advice for those grappling with writing is to take it step by step, or "bird by bird," her father's advice to Lamott's ten-year-old brother when he was paralyzed by a writing assignment about birds.
M. S.
edited by Keith Allan Noble.
Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1995. 381 pp. $59.95.
This collection of quotes on more than four hundred topics related to education is ideal for gaining perspective and insight into this broad field. The quotations from both male and female authors reach as far back as three thousand years. The nearly 2,700 entries reveal how education has been perceived at different times and in various societies. For example, in the sage words of Diogenes (circa 400-325 B.C.E.), "Education is a controlling grace to the young, consolation to the old, wealth to the poor, and ornament to the rich" (p. 78). Oscar Wilde, writing in the late nineteenth century, offers a humbling quote for educators: "Education is a wonderful thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught" (p. 86). And the contemporaneous and humorous Rita Mae Brown said in 1988, "Education is a wonderful thing. If you couldn't sign your name you'd have to pay cash" (p. 78).
The encyclopedia is well organized. Under each topic, quotes are listed alphabetically by author; if the author is unknown, they are listed by source. There is also an author index listing all of the quotations included in the encyclopedia from that individual. This volume moves readers beyond their own specialized worlds and invites them to muse, reflect on, and contemplate the wide world of education.
M. S.
by Robert S. Weiss.
New York: Free Press, 1994. 246 pp. $27.95.
As qualitative research methods are increasingly being refined and reconsidered for use in an ever wider variety of fields, the need for accessible, easily understood, and thorough work on the topic becomes more important. Robert Weiss's Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies is a useful and informative beginner-level book for anyone interested in the basics of how to conduct qualitative research. Weiss draws primarily from his personal experience and knowledge of qualitative research in an honest, brief, and thorough manner: he gives examples of his mistakes, he organizes his book into short chapters, and he offers step-by-step analysis of transcribed interviews. Weiss also draws from other authors' works (as in his chapter "Analysis of Data"), encourages the integration of qualitative and qualitative methodologies by emphasizing their complementarity, and offers a wealth of examples to reinforce his many clearly stated points. Anyone needing to refresh, reorient, or even initiate their knowledge about qualitative interview studies will find this book a quick and compact read.
N. H.