Synopses & Reviews
Cutting Through the Hype: The Essential Guide to School Reform is a revised, expanded, and updated version of the classic work by Jane L. David and Larry Cuban. It offers balanced analyses of twenty-three widespread school reform strategies, form teacher performance pay to turnaround schools and data-driven instruction. Avoiding the heated rhetoric and exaggerated claims that accompany many education reforms, each chapter explains clearly and concisely what each reform intends to do, what happens in reality, and what it takes to make it work. Written by two savvy and experience educator-researchers,
Cutting Through the Hype is a book for expert and nonexpert readers alike—policymakers, researchers, school leaders, teachers, and concerned citizens and parents—indeed, for all who are committed to schools and have a stake in their success.
“David and Cuban bring a wealth of background knowledge to their task that allows them to bring clarity to some of the most important policy choices confronting us, without compromising the complexity of those choices. This work is practical, provocative, and eminently readable.” — Charles M. Payne, Frank P. Hixon Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago
“David and Cuban write in a balanced tone about a wide array of politically charged education reforms. With each reform they explore its origins, the problem the reform set out to solve, and the research on its efficacy. Their book cuts concisely and clearly to these critical aspects of each reform, making it an excellent primer for anyone new to these ideas and a perfect review for anyone who has been in the field and wants a reasoned and historical perspective.” — Heather Kirkpatrick, vice president of education, Aspire Public Schools
“Two veteran educators bring fierce idealism and trenchant analysis to the examination of every imaginable issue in American education—from merit pay to phonics, from closing the achievement gap to computers in the classroom. This lively and thoughtful book will provide grist for many good debates among educators and those who care about our schools.” — Kim Marshall, former Boston Public School principal, Editor of the Marshall Memo
Jane L. David is director of the Bay Area Research Group, Palo Alto, California. Larry Cuban is professor emeritus of education at Stanford University and author of many books, including Against the Odds: Insights from One District’s Small School Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2010).
Review
and#8220;American School Reformand#160;offers a substantive contribution to school reform debates, focusing on what it takes to create, sustain, andand#8212;importantlyand#8212;continually renew the conditions for successful reform. It combines a notion of the precariousness of reform with optimism, outlining a pragmatic path of incremental improvement that recognizes the very severe and systemic obstacles in its way without stoking frustration or backlash that would undermine the long-term aspiration.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;American School Reform importantly advances a historically grounded conceptual framework to understand how the arguments, theories of action, and action space devoted to school reforms change over time, fail, and then get reincarnated in other forms as actors and contexts shift. The authors appreciate and use the past to underscore how earlier reforms have influenced contemporary ones, how the debris of collapsed reforms become building blocks for newer ones. In this way they do what many historiansand#8212;but too few reformersand#8212;do: account for both continuity and change.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Urban school districts have been the focal points for intensive reform efforts over the past two decades. All of these efforts have been highly contentious, and they have produced mixed results. The more that is known about what makes reform successful and unsuccessful in these contexts, the greater the likelihood for success in the future. American School Reform makes a significant contribution to this knowledge. It tells important stories about significant reforms in four cities and provides a new way of looking at reform that can be useful moving forward.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;McDonald and colleagues make a valuable theoretical contribution to the field of district-level school reform through their integrative framework and nuanced cross-case analysis of diverse school reform efforts.andrdquo;
Review
“David and Cuban bring a wealth of background knowledge to their task that allows them to bring clarity to some of the most important policy choices confronting us, without compromising the complexity of those choices. This work is practical, provocative, and eminently readable.” —
Charles M. Payne, Frank P. Hixon Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago
Review
“David and Cuban write in a balanced tone about a wide array of politically charged education reforms. With each reform they explore its origins, the problem the reform set out to solve, and the research on its efficacy. Their book cuts concisely and clearly to these critical aspects of each reform, making it an excellent primer for anyone new to these ideas and a perfect review for anyone who has been in the field and wants a reasoned and historical perspective.” —
Heather Kirkpatrick, vice president of education, Aspire Public Schools
Review
“Two veteran educators bring fierce idealism and trenchant analysis to the examination of every imaginable issue in American education—from merit pay to phonics, from closing the achievement gap to computers in the classroom. This lively and thoughtful book will provide grist for many good debates among educators and those who care about our schools.” — Kim Marshall, former Boston Public School principal, Editor of the Marshall Memo
Synopsis
Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nationand#8217;s largest cities,
American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challengeand#151;launched in 1994and#151;alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; and#160;
McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hopeand#151;that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better. and#160;and#160;
Synopsis
Cutting Through the Hype is a book on school reform fit for academics, policy makers, and general readers alike. The authors analyze twenty-three trending school reform strategies such as performance pay and turnaround programs.
Synopsis
Revised, Expanded, and Updated Edition Cutting Through the Hype: The Essential Guide to School Reform offers balanced analyses of 23 currently popular school reform strategies, from teacher performance pay and putting mayors in charge to turnaround schools and data-driven instruction.
Avoiding the heated rhetoric and exaggerated claims that accompany many education reforms, each chapter explains clearly and concisely what each reform intends to do, what happens in reality, and what it takes to make it work. Written by two savvy and experienced educator-researchers, Cutting Through the Hype is a book for expert and nonexpert readers alike—policymakers, researchers, school leaders, teachers, and concerned citizens and parents—indeed, for all who are committed to schools and have a stake in their success."
About the Author
Jane L. David is director of the Bay Area Research Group, Palo Alto, California.Larry Cuban is professor emeritus of education at Stanford University. His most recent books are As Good As It Gets: What School Reform Brought to Austin and Cutting Through the Hype: The Essential Guide to School Reform (Harvard Education Press).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Theory of Action Space
Chapter 3. Action Space in Chicago and New York
Chapter 4. Action Space in Context: Philadelphia and the Bay Area
Chapter 5. Learning from Collapse in Philadelphia and Chicago
Chapter 6. Learning from Connections in New York
Chapter 7. Implications for Practice
Notes
References
Index