Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, Jun 30, 2009 - Education - 192 pages
For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices. In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to reinvent schooling? Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.
 

Contents

Learning from the Past
1
1 Progress or Regress?
12
2 Policy Cycles and Institutional Trends
40
3 How Schools Change Reforms
60
4 Why the Grammar of Schooling Persists
85
5 Reinventing Schooling
110
Looking toward the Future
134
Notes
145
Acknowledgments
177
Index
179
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