Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 3)

With Part 3, readers have now seen most of the draft Introduction to my next book. Comments welcomed. For those readers wanting citations, please contact me.

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).

Where students went to school in the U.S. depended upon where families lived.  In most cities and suburbs neighborhood were segregated producing schools that were nearly all-white, Black or Latino. Activists used both direct action such as boycotts and marches and legal strategies to get urban and suburban districts to desegregate through busing, building schools that straddled city and county 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.

Nonetheless, each generation of reformers believed in their hearts that they could solve thorny social, political, and economic problems. They knew what had to be done and had the answers. Public schools, they held, were the chief, if not the sole, determiner of individual and national success.  Schooling was the great CONTINUE READING: Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 2)

It would be a grave mistake to think that American reformers only looked at schools as targets for change.

Reforming individual Americans to be better persons has been in the American blood stream since the Mayflower arrived. Ditto for reforming community institutions to be better places within which to live and work.  Perfecting individuals and community institutions while solving problems of urban slums, corrupt city governments, poverty, racial segregation, corporate over-reach, and anemic economic growth has been steady work for reformers. Time and again these reform movements reached far beyond schools. [i]

As predictable as climbing up a ladder to clean leaves from roof gutters every season, reforms have regularly swept across the nation. Since the early 1900s, three overlapping social, political, and economic movements have churned across the U.S. and left marks on government, business, and community institutions, including public schools: The Progressive movement (1900s-1950s), the Civil Rights Struggle (1950s-1970s), and Binding Schools to the Economy (1980s-present). [ii]

 Reform movements 

Each of these political and social movements sought multiple goals one of which included school reform.  Early 20th century Progressives sought to remedy CONTINUE READING: Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 1)

I have completed a draft of my next book called “Confessions of a School Reformer.” The first part of the Introduction to the book follows.

Just see wherever we peer into the first tiny springs of the national life, how this true panacea for all of the ills of the body politic bubbles forth—education, education, education.

                        Andrew Carnegie, 1886[i]

School houses do not teach themselves – piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.

W.E.B. DuBois, 1903[ii]

At the desk where I sit in Washington, I have learned one great truth: The answer for all our national problems comes down to one single word: education

                        President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964[iii]

[E]ducation is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little CONTINUE READING: Americans’ Secular Faith in Schooling (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice