Search results for ""Author Larry Cuban""

Take an economically and racially diverse urban school district emerging from a long history of segregation. Add an energetic, capable, bridge-building superintendent with ambitious district-wide goals to improve graduation rates, school attendance, and academic performance. Consider that he was well funded and strongly supported by city leaders, teachers, and parents, and ask how much changed in a decade of his tenure—and what remained unchanged? Larry Cuban takes this richly detailed history of the Austin, Texas, school district, under Superintendent Pat Forgione, to ask the question that few politicians and school reformers want to touch. Given effective use of widely welcomed reforms, can school policies and practices put all children at the same academic level? Are class and ethnic differences in academic performance within the power of schools to change?Cuban argues that the overall district has shown much improvement—better test scores, more high school graduates, and more qualified teachers. But the improvements are unevenly distributed. The elementary schools improved, as did the high schools located in affluent, well-educated, largely white neighborhoods. But the least improvement came where it was needed most: the predominantly poor, black, and Latino high schools. Before Forgione arrived, over 10 percent of district schools were failing, and after he left office, roughly the same percentage continued to fail. Austin’s signal successes amid failure hold answers to tough questions facing urban district leaders across the nation.

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A groundbreaking analysis of how teachers actually teach and have taught in the past. The quality and effectiveness of teaching are a constant subject of discussion within the profession and among the broader public. Most of that conversation focuses on the question of how teachers should teach. In The Enduring Classroom, veteran teacher and scholar of education Larry Cuban explores different questions, ones that just might be more important: How have teachers actually taught? How do they teach now? And what can we learn from both? Examining both past and present is crucial, Cuban explains. If reformers want teachers to adopt new techniques, they need to understand what teachers are currently doing if they want to have any hope of having their innovations implemented. Cuban takes us into classrooms then and now, using observations from contemporary research as well as a rich historical archive of classroom accounts, along the way asking larger questions about teacher training and the individual motivations of people in the classroom. Do teachers freely choose how to teach, or are they driven by their beliefs and values about teaching and learning? What role do students play in determining how teachers teach? Do teachers teach as they were taught? By asking and answering these and other policy questions with the aid of concrete data about actual classroom practices, Cuban helps us make a crucial step toward creating reforms that could actually improve instruction.

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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 schools—equipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplace—overwhelmed 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.

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A groundbreaking analysis of how teachers actually teach and have taught in the past. The quality and effectiveness of teaching are a constant subject of discussion within the profession and among the broader public. Most of that conversation focuses on the question of how teachers should teach. In The Enduring Classroom, veteran teacher and scholar of education Larry Cuban explores different questions, ones that just might be more important: How have teachers actually taught? How do they teach now? And what can we learn from both? Examining both past and present is crucial, Cuban explains. If reformers want teachers to adopt new techniques, they need to understand what teachers are currently doing if they want to have any hope of having their innovations implemented. Cuban takes us into classrooms then and now, using observations from contemporary research as well as a rich historical archive of classroom accounts, along the way asking larger questions about teacher training and the individual motivations of people in the classroom. Do teachers freely choose how to teach, or are they driven by their beliefs and values about teaching and learning? What role do students play in determining how teachers teach? Do teachers teach as they were taught? By asking and answering these and other policy questions with the aid of concrete data about actual classroom practices, Cuban helps us make a crucial step toward creating reforms that could actually improve instruction.

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For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans’ faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices.In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to “reinvent” schooling?Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.

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