New Book on Market-Based, Educational Reforms
For those of you looking for a good read, you may want to check out this new book: “Learning from the Federal Market‐Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA [the Every Student Succeeds Act]” here.
As Larry Cuban put it, the book’s editors have a “cast of all-star scholars” in this volume, and in Gloria Ladson-Billings words, the editors “assembled some of the nation’s best minds” to examine the evidence on today’s market-based reforms as well as more promising, equitable ones. For full disclosure, I have a chapter in this book about using value-added models (VAMs) to measure and evaluate teacher education programs (see below), although I am not making any royalties from book sales.
If interested, you can purchase the book at a reduced price of $30 (from $40) per paperback thru 7/31/17, using the following discount code at checkout: LFMBR30350. Here, again, is the link.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Over the past twenty years, educational policy has been characterized by top‐down, market‐focused policies combined with a push toward privatization and school choice. The new Every Student Succeeds Act continues along this path, though with decision‐making authority now shifted toward the states. These market‐based reforms have often been touted as the most promising response to the challenges of poverty and educational disenfranchisement. But has this approach been successful? Has learning improved? Have historically low‐scoring schools “turned around” or have the reforms had little effect? Have these narrow conceptions of schooling harmed the civic and social purposes of education in a democracy?
This book presents the evidence. Drawing on the work of the nation’s most prominent researchers, the book explores the major elements of these reforms, as well as the social, political, and educational contexts in which they take place. It examines the evidence supporting the most common school improvement strategies: school choice; reconstitutions, or massive personnel changes; and school closures. From there, it New Book on Market-Based, Educational Reforms | VAMboozled!:
