"We Are All Reformers" (Part 5)
This five part series ends with my leaving high school and going to a commuter college in Pittsburgh. These five parts are drafts of what may become my next book, part analysis of school reform and part memoir. The working title of that book is “Confessions of a School Reformer.”
In alternating chapters, the book will describe and analyze each of three reform movements during my lifetime and then trace my life in and out of school as a student, teacher, administrator and researcher who experienced directly continual reforms for over three-quarters of a century.
Since 1939 when I entered first grade until 2020, three major reform efforts have swept across American public schools: the Progressive movement (1890s-1940s); Civil Rights movement (1950s-1970s), and business-inspired standards, testing, and accountability movement (1970s-present).
As a student (1939-1951) I was the object of Progressive reforms. As a teacher and administrator (1950s-1980s) I designed and implemented classroom, school, and district reforms during the Civil Rights movement and then as a superintendent the first decades of the standards, testing, and accountability effort, and as a researcher since then I have described and analyzed U.S. school reforms.
The theme that runs through the five parts thus far is that my years as an elementary and secondary school student, while of great importance in awakening parts of me that I had not known, were CONTINUE READING: "We Are All Reformers" (Part 5) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice