rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    non sort: The
    title: allure of order
    sub title: high hopes, dashed expectations, and the troubled quest to remake American schooling
  name:
    name part: Mehta, Jal.
    role:
      role term: creator
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2013
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: viii, 396 pages ; 24 cm.
  abstract: Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make the states set high standards, measure student progress and hold failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach to school reform that Americans have tried before. In The Allure of Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this elusive goal. Not once, not twice, but three separate times-in the Progressive Era, the 1960s and '70s, and NCLB-reformers have hit upon the same idea for remaking schools. Over and over again, outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific management and have attempted to apply principles of rational administration from above. Each of these movements started with high hopes and ambitious promises, but each gradually discovered that schooling is not easy to "order" from afar. Policymakers are too far from schools to know what they need, teachers are resistant to top-down mandates and the practice of good teaching is too complex for simple external standardization. The larger problem, Mehta argues, is that reformers have it backwards. They are trying to do on the back-end, through external accountability, what they should have done on the front-end: build a strong, skilled and expert profession. Our current pattern is to draw less than our most talented people into teaching, equip them with little relevant knowledge, train them minimally, put them in a weak welfare state and then hold them accountable when they predictably do not achieve what we seek. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach which characterizes top-performing educational nations. Aattract strong candidates into teaching, develop relevan…
  table of contents: Chapter One: The Allure of Order: Rationalizing Schools From the Progressive to the Present -- Chapter Two: The Cultural Struggle for Control Over Schooling: The Power of Ideas and the Weakness of the Educational Field -- Chapter Three: Taking Control from Above: The Rationalization of Schooling in the Progressive Era -- Chapter Four: The Forgotten Standards Movement: The Coleman Report, the Defense Department, and a Nascent Push for Educational Accountability -- Chapter Five: Setting the Problem: The Deep Roots and Long Shadows of A Nation at Risk -- Chapter Six: A Semi-Profession in an Era of Accountability -- Chapter Seven: E Pluribus Unum: How Standards and Accountability Became King -- Chapter Eight: Transforming Federal Policy: Ideas and the Triumph of Accountability Politics -- Chapter Nine: Rationalizing Schools: Patterns, Ironies, Contradictions -- Chapter Ten: Beyond Rationalization: Inverting the Pyramid, Remaking the Educational Sector -- Bibliography.
  note: Jal Mehta.
  note: Includes bibliographical references (pages [355]-376) and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    topic: Public schools
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: Educational change
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: Education and state
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: EDUCATION / General
  subject:
    topic: EDUCATION / Administration / General
  subject:
    topic: EDUCATION / Higher
  classification: LA217.2 .M436 2013
  classification: 371.010973
  related item:
    title info:
      title: Oxford studies in postwar American political development
  identifier: 9780199942060 (hardback)
  identifier: 0199942064 (hardback)
  identifier: 2012046809
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 130117
    record change date: 20151204205742.0
    record identifier: in00003156398