Class Warfare

by Rochester, J. Martin

• ISBN13: 9781893554535
• ISBN10: 1893554538
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Encounter Books

Summary

This book offers a first-hand account of the Great American Education War being waged from coast to coast, including the reading wars, maths wars, testing wars, and other schoolyard scuffles reported almost daily by the nation's media. Martin Rochester takes the reader on a field trip that begins with his own upper-middle class suburban school district in St Louis and then moves on to inner-city locales and some of the best private schools, in showing how 'pack pedagogy' has steamrollered parent resistance in promoting disasters such as whole-language, fuzzy maths, multiple intelligence theory, teacher-as-coach, the therapeutic classroom, and all the other latest fads found in today's schools. Rochester concludes that all children are being victimised, not only the most gifted, but especially 'average' students and those lower achieving kids whose needs are now supposedly driving the entire curriculum.

Author Biography

J. Martin Rochester is the Curators' Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Table of Contents

How I Became a Soldier in the Great American Education War	1	(11)
What's Nutty About Contemporary K -- 12 Education, in a Nutshell	12	(13)
For Whom the School Bell Tolls: The Clash Between Excellence and Equity	25	(40)
Are the Three Stooges Really Geniuses in Disguise?	65	(26)
The Therapeutic Classroom	91	(35)
Basic Training in the Three R's	126	(49)
The Teacher as Coach	175	(45)
A Modest Proposal for a Cease-Fire	220	(23)
Notes	243	(63)
Index	306