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Changing
American Education: Recapturing the past or Inventing the
Future? Edited by Kathryn M. Borman
& Nancy P. Greenman (State Univ of New York Press:
May 1994), 416 pages.
Amazon Price
$24.95 Soft Cover
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The terminology of school reform remains unclear,
obscured by ideological rhetoric. What is meant by terms
such as "school restructuring," "site-based management," and
"teacher education reform"? This book examines social
changes affecting education; amplifies case studies of
school change; and analyzes the gap between the rhetoric and
reality of educational reform. Changing American Education
examines the nature of comprehensive, large-scale historical
and social changes that contextualize educational reform and
amplifies the meaning of lessons learned by those who have
assisted in change efforts.
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Dumbing
Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good about
Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or
Add, By Charles J. Sykes
(St. Martin's Press: New York, October 1995), 341 pages.
Amazon Price
$16.77 Hard Cover
Also available in Soft Cover
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In this book, Sykes argues that the school wars of the
1990s will be the defining cultural and political debate of
our time. While many parents bask in the glow of complacency
about their own children's education, Dumbing Down Our Kids
documents the collapse of standards in our schools, the
flight from learning, and the triumph of mediocre, feel-good
education that is more concerned with pumping up self-esteem
than it is with passing on knowledge.
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Not
with My Child You Don't: A Citizens' Guide to Eradicating
OBE and Restoring Education, By Robert
Holland ( Chesapeake Capital Services, January 1996).
Amazon Price
$12.95 Soft Cover
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Here is the truth about the concerted effort of the Big
Government, Big Education, and Big Business establishments
to restructure America's schools into centers of groupthink
and conformity to programmed "outcomes." This book will tell
you how to detect Outcome-Based Education (and related
doctrines) in your schools and how to work for constructive
change based on academic fundamentals.
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Politics,
Markets, and America's Schools, By John
E. Chubb Terry M. Moe (Brookings Institution:
Washington, D.C., July 1990), 318 pages.
Amazon Price
$15.16 Soft Cover
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Chubb (fellow in governmental studies, Brookings) and Moe
(political science, Stanford) recommend a new system of
public education, built around parent-teacher choice and
school competition, that would promote school autonomy, thus
providing a firm foundation for genuine school improvement
and superior student achievement. Annotation copyright Book
News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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Public
Education: An Autopsy, By Dr. Myron
Lieberman (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1993),
400 pages.
Amazon Price
$11.96 Soft Cover
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Public education is irreversibly doomed, says Lieberman,
because government neglects its role as protector of
consumer interests in order to protect its role as producer.
He argues that only the free market can save education, and
proposes a three-sector industry encompassing public,
non-profit, and for-profit schools. Annotation copyright,
Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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School
Choice: Why You Need It--how You Get
It, By David J. Harmer
(Cato Institute: Washington, D.C., October 1994), 203 pages.
Amazon Price
$12.95 Soft Cover
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As President of ExCEL, the Excellence Through Choice in
Education League, David Harmer has traveled throughout
California defending the Parental Choice in Education
Initiative and encouraging parents who want better schools
for their children. In School Choice, he
compares the performance of poor schools and good schools,
and shows that only when parents are allowed to choose
freely among them will all children have the opportunity for
a better education.
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The
Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them: And Why We Don't
Have Them, By E. D. Hirsch Jr.
(Doubleday: New York, September 1996), 317 pages.
Amazon Price
$17.47 Hard Cover
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By providing evidence of numerous studies proving that
fact-based education works, the author of Cultural Literacy
proves that if children are taught substantial knowledge and
skills--and learn to work hard to acquire them--their test
scores will rise, their love of learning will grow, and they
will become enthusiastic participants in the information-age
civilization.
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Short
Route to Chaos: Conscience, Community, and the
Re-Constitution of American Schooling,
By Stephen Arons ( Univ. of Massachusetts Press:
June 1997), 224 pages.
Amazon Price
$11.96 Soft Cover
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Short Route to Chaos develops a series of specific
suggestions for reform based on the principle that
education, like religion, is a matter of conscience in which
families should be free to select their children's schools
and public funding should be allocated equally for each
child, regardless of wealth or geographic location. The
author goes on to propose public debate about a possible
education amendment to the U.S. Constitution. His book is an
impassioned call for a pragmatic and populist
re-constitution of American schooling - one that respects
conscience, supports community, and reinvigorates the
principles of constitutional democracy.
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Teacher
Pay and Teacher Quality, By Dale Ballou
and Michael Podgursky (W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment
Research: Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1997), 185 pages.
Amazon Price
$15.00 Soft Cover
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Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality begins with
an empirical analysis of the effect that salary changes in
the 1980s had on teacher recruitment. The surprising
finding: there was virtually no relationship. The states in
which teacher salaries rose little relative to other
occupations experienced just about the same change in
teacher qualifications as states that made a substantial
effort to boost teacher pay. Since this finding appears to
defy standard economic theory as well as common sense, the
authors consider a variety of explanations. What they found
is that the explanation is to be found in the way the
teacher labor market functions. The authors see more promise
in deregulating public education, relying instead on
competition and consumer choice to improve performance.
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Teachers
Evaluating Teachers: Peer Review and the New
Unionism, By Myron Lieberman
(Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, NJ, 1998), 137
pages.
Amazon Price
$17.95 Soft Cover
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Teachers Evaluating Teachers explores the
peer review phenomenon and the teacher unions' stake in
perpetuating it. Lieberman examines the costs of peer review
programs and seeks to determine whether their promised
benefits have been realized. The true test of a program's
success should be improvement in teacher competence, which
would lead to gains in student achievement, but Lieberman
argues that there is no evidence that student scores on
standardized tests have improved in districts with peer
review. Indeed, he shows that peer review has had little or
no impact on the number of teachers dismissed on grounds of
poor performance.
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The
Teacher Unions, By Myron Lieberman
(Encounter Books: San Francisco, 2000), 300 pages.
Amazon Price
$13.56 Soft Cover
* An Amazon.com Recommended Book
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"Fixing" public education has become an American
obsession. But according to educational theorist Myron
Lieberman, the major problem our schools face is not class
size, poor teacher pay, dilapidated buildings, or even
"dumbed down" subject matter. The chief obstacle to reform
is a pair of powerful and well entrenched organizations, the
National Educational Association (NEA) and the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT), with over three million
members and national revenues of over $1 billion a year,
which they use to maintain the status quo. In this startling
expose, Lieberman shows how the teachers' unions raise and
spend vast sums to maintain their power over education and
to push a narrow political agenda. Even dues-paying teachers
will be angered to learn how their unions stifle dissent,
sabotage meaningful reform, and hold parents hostage to
bureaucracy.
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