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Monday, August 13, 2012

The Paradoxical Logic of School Turnarounds: A Catch-22 (Tina Trujillo) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Paradoxical Logic of School Turnarounds: A Catch-22 (Tina Trujillo) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:


The Paradoxical Logic of School Turnarounds: A Catch-22 (Tina Trujillo)

TINA TRUJILLO is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in education from the University of California at Los Angeles and an M.A. in education from the University of Colorado Boulder. This commentary appeared inTeachers College Record on June 14, 2012. Sources cited here are listed in the online article.
In the 1955 classic novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller chronicles the absurdity of the bureaucratic rules and constraints to which a conflicted Air Force bombardier and countless others are subjected. Each character lives under the absolute, yet illogical, power of these policies. One by one, they come to see the paradoxical nature of the policies, and eventually the bombardier realizes that the main policy—Catch-22—is an empty one, based on