A Legacy of Learning Your Stake in Standards and New Kinds of Public Schools

by Kearns, David T.; Harvey, James; Bush, George

• ISBN13: 9780815748946
• ISBN10: 0815748949
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-03-01
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Summary

What's wrong with America's schools? Why can't we fix them? How did we wind up with dropout rates of 25 percent and graduates who can barely read and write? Why does the United States spend twice as much on education as the international average and wind up near the bottom of the barrel in global comparisons of student achievement? Why do we lag behind nations such as South Korea, Hungary, and Singapore? And how should we go about improving the situation?Answers to these questions lie at the heart of this volume. David T. Kearns and James Harvey contend we are fine-tuning failure. We have yet to break with the past in order to face a different and challenging future. Despite worshiping at the altar of "local control" we have managed to create cookie-cutter schools across the country. We have been sidestepping the transparent need for common expectations about what students should know and be able to do. Standards, the authors say, are not clear enough or high enough. Above all, we have met the enemy and it is us: all of us support "change" as long as someone else is changing.This book is a fascinating and provocative analysis of where we went wrong and what we need to do to get American education back on track. It defines the kind of education our kids deserve. It calls for a new definition of "public education" in which choice is taken for granted. And it outlines an action agenda to help parents and citizens make first-class schools truly their own.In the future, the authors argue, we should think of a public school as any other non-profit entity --capable of operating in the public interest free of the red tape now strangling public education. It should be paid for by the public and accountable to the public, with its charter or contract routinely revoked when it stops serving public purposes or fails to meet its performance goals.

Author Biography

David T. Kearns is chairman emeritus of New American Schools. He is former chairman and CEO of the Xerox Corporation.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
George Bush
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(6)
We Need to Change	7	(15)
Schools: Good and Getting Better? Or Bad and Getting Worse?	22	(14)
How Did We Get This Way? Decent Impulses Gone Astray	36	(13)
What Specifically Is Wrong?	49	(13)
Lessons from Other Institutional Turnarounds	62	(18)
Applying These Other Lessons to Schools	80	(10)
The Great Promise of New American Schools	90	(12)
Other Good News about Schools	102	(15)
The Politics of Change: Agreeing to Agree	117	(17)
Agenda for Change, Part I: Straightening Out the System	134	(16)
Agenda for Change, Part II: Hardwiring Innovation into the System	150	(18)
Agenda for Change, Part III: Ten Ground Rules to Advance Education Reform	168	(35)
APPENDIXES
A Nine Keys to Systematic Reform	187	(2)
B Defining the Terms of the Standards Debate	189	(2)
C Resources for Change	191	(12)
Notes	203	(14)
Index	217