Creating Educational Access, Equity, and Opportunity for All

Real Change Requires Redesigning Public Education to Reflect Today's World

By (author) Everette W. Surgenor

Publication date:

24 September 2014

Length of book:

174 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475806977

Louis Sullivan, an American architect, was referred to as the "father of modernism" and coined the phrase "form follows function.” His phrase provides a key insight into the state of public education in America. The existing form for public education is industrial in nature and is not a match for what should be the function of an education system in an information age society—one that is characterized by technology, globalism, a new definition of work, and rapid, relentless change.

This book explains how the mismatch between function and form is creating circumstances that are putting the future of public education at risk, leading to system dysfunction, deregulation, and privatization. Public education needs to be redesigned and reformatted to match the function of the age in which we now live. The current structure and function denies too many students the levels of access, equity, and opportunity that their parents once enjoyed. Achieving that outcome is important to the economic, social, and political wellbeing of America.

Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: A Society in Conflict
Chapter Two: Three Generations of Reform
Chapter Three: Why Reform Initiatives Have Not Worked
Chapter Four: The Clattering Train
Chapter Five: The Wrong Road
Chapter Six: Differing Ages–Differing Contexts
Chapter Seven: Responding to Change in the Face of Adversity
Chapter Eight: The Context for Change
Chapter Nine: The Importance of Prior Learning to the Reform/Change Process
Chapter Ten: The Processes of Reform
Chapter Eleven: The Organizational Structures of Reform
Chapter Twelve: Identifying Needed Reforms to Practice
Chapter Thirteen: Shaping the Reform Process
Chapter Fourteen: Building a Reform Process That Responds to Continuous and Rapid Change
Chapter Fifteen: What the Future Holds
Chapter Sixteen: Engaging This Future

Everette Surgenor’s new book titled Creating Educational Access, Equity and Opportunity For All presents a compelling vision for the future of education. Surgenor’s vision, however, cannot become reality unless there are thousands of educators with the courage, passion, and vision to take action to transform their school systems. They will need courage to face the adversity they will face as those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo fiercely resist their efforts to transform—and they will resist because their entire careers and their sources of substantial funds are anchored to the Industrial-Age paradigm. They will need passion to give them the emotional and physical energy to “stay in the fight” in the face of the adversity, in spite of the odds, and despite efforts of politicians to continue funding education within the existing paradigm. And, of course, they will need a vision—like Surgenor’s—that will serve as their “North Star” to guide them toward the dream that so many of us share for a new way of educating our children.