Introduction to My Next Book (Part 3)
And so, the last century of reform in America has been the story of these three political and social movements beginning with excited policy talk, then moving to downsized policy actions, and finally erratic implementation spilling over public schools. Beyond these reformers achieving a few of their intended goals in each era, what often goes unnoticed are some of the unintended—even perverse– effects of hyperbolic reform talk, narrowed adoption of policies, and uneven execution.
Perverse outcomes of school reforms
Consider the massive effort by civil rights reformers to desegregate schools between the 1960s and 1980s following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown decision (1954).
Activists used both direct action such as boycotts and marches and indirect action such as legal strategies to get urban districts to desegregate through busing, making larger city/county districts that straddled attendance boundaries, and taking school boards to federal court for maintaining segregated schools—strategies that civil rights reformers believed would bring minority and white children together to learn. Many of these efforts succeeded, particularly in the South in the 1970s and 1980s (see here and here).
The fact of the matter is that then residential segregation determined school CONTINUE READING: Introduction to My Next Book (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice