Reconstructing the Common Good in Education

by Cuban, Larry; Shipps, Dorothy

• ISBN13: 9780804738620
• ISBN10: 0804738629
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

For almost two centuries, Americans expected that their public schools would cultivate the personal, moral, and social development of individual students, create citizens, and bind diverse groups into one nation. Since the 1980s, however, a new generation of school reformers has been intent on using schools to solve the nation's economic problems. An economic justification for public schoolsequipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplaceoverwhelmed other historically accepted purposes for tax-supported public schools. Private sector management has become the model for public school systems as schools and districts are "downsized," "restructured," and "outsourced." Recent reform proposals have called for government-funded vouchers to send children to private schools, the creation of self-governing charter schools, the contracting of schools to private entrepreneurs, and the partnerships with the business community in promoting new information technologies. But if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only toward enhancing the country's economic success? Is everything public for sale? Are the interests of individuals or selected groups overwhelming the common good that the founders of tax-supported public schools so fervently sought? This volume explores the ongoing debates about what constitutes the common good in American public education, assessing the long-standing tensions between shared purposes and individual interests in schooling. It shows how recent school reform efforts, driven by economic concerns, have worsened the conflict between the legitimate interests of individuals and society as a whole, and demonstrates that reconstructing the common good envisioned by the founders of public education in the United States remains essential and unfinished work.

Author Biography

Larry Cuban is Professor of Education at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change Without Reform in University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research. Dorothy Shipps is Assistant Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Contributors	xi
Foreword	xv
Patricia Albjerg Graham
Introduction	1	(8)
Larry Cuban
Dorothy Shipps
Part I. Ways of Seeing the Common Good in Public Education: The Past Informing the Present	9	(98)
Public Schools and the Elusive Search for the Common Good	13	(19)
William J. Reese
Turning Points: Reconstruction and the Growth of National Influence in Education	32	(19)
Ted Mitchell
``There Is No Escape...from the Ogre of Indoctrination'': George Counts and the Civic Dilemmas of Democratic Educators	51	(17)
Daniel Perlstein
``No One Here to Put Us Down'': Hispano Education in a Southern Colorado Community, 1920--1963	68	(14)
Ruben Donato
Echoes of Corporate Influence: Managing Away Urban School Troubles	82	(25)
Dorothy Shipps
Part II. Ways of Seeing the Common Good in Public Education: Social and Political Implications	107	(64)
No Exit: Public Education as an Inescapably Public Good	110	(20)
David F. Labaree
Bureaucracy Left and Right: Thinking About the One Best System	130	(18)
Harvey Kantor
Robert Lowe
Why Is It So Hard to Get ``Good'' Schools?	148	(23)
Larry Cuban
Part III. Uncommon Ways of Seeing the Common Good	171	(52)
Civic Friendship: An Aristotelian Perspective	173	(13)
Elisabeth Hansot
Devotion and Ambiguity in the Struggles of a Poor Mother and Her Family: New York City, 1918--1919	186	(20)
Michael B. Katz
Reflections on Education as Transcendence	206	(17)
John Meyer
Afterword	223	(8)
Dorothy Shipps
Larry Cuban
Notes	231	(14)
References	245	(30)
Index	275