Vicious Circles in Education Reform

Assimilation, Americanization, and Fulfilling the Middle Class Ethic

By (author) Eric Shyman Professor of Special Education, Dowling College, NY

Publication date:

12 October 2016

Length of book:

158 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

239x159mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781475827217

Vicious Circles traces the history of development of public education and the near simultaneous advent of educational reform from its very beginning. Drawing on history, politics, law, sociology, and educational research, all aspects of public schooling are brought to light using a non-partisan analytical approach. Critically examining areas such as institutional racism, sexism, ableism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia, as well as the corporatization and privatization of public schooling, Shyman extracts the fundamental problems that have ever plagued, and continue to plague, successful education reform. Essentially, Shyman demonstrates that little progress in the area of education reform has ever been made. Rather, the same misinformed, repackaged efforts by a disconnected and insularly private political elite have continued to be applied, perpetuating a “vicious circle” of failed and misguided attempts at education reform.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Stories we Tell: Narratives of Public Schooling
Chapter 2 Schooling as Sieve: Distinguishing between the Classes
Chapter 3 Schooling and the Real America: Immigrants and Americanization
Chapter 4 Schools of Thought: Systematizing the Study of Education
Chapter 5 The Flat Free World: Global Competitiveness and Equal Educational Opportunity
Chapter 6 Our Kids, Our Rules: Centralizing or Decentralizing America’s Schools
Chapter 7 A Study in Misrepresentation: Intellectual Interpretation of Policy Talk
Chapter 8 Schooling and the “Culturally Deprived”: Racism and American Schooling
Chapter 9 White Flight and Black Plight: Situating the Segregated Neighborhood
Chapter 10 Measuring Value: Intelligence Testing and the “Science” of Ability
Chapter 11 Able Minds, Able Bodies: Ableism and the Public School
Chapter 12 Segregation’s New Stripes: Race, Language, and Special Education
Chapter 13 You’re an American Now: Assimilation or Elimination for the un-American
Chapter 14 It’s a Man’s World
Chapter 15 Vicious Circles in Education Reform: Conclusion

Shyman takes on the most complicated and critical issue that we have spent a lot of energy avoiding: what are schools for? He covers a lot of terrain and skillfully helps us see ways in which we could move forward to make schools serve democratic ends. But will we? He doesn’t shy away from how difficult it will be and why it requires very different alliances and trade-offs than education policy has relied on in the past period of history.