Dis-positioning NCATE and teacher-ed (again)
There’s been a spate of online stories and blogs about NCATE‘s president Art Wise announcing that the definition of social justice will be removed from NCATE documents on accreditation at a hearing where critics were ready to suggest removing NCATE as a federally-approved accreditor because, they argued, the combination of requiring certain evidence of dispositions […]
More on incrementalism or tinkering
Since I discussed incrementalism a few days ago, let me continue in that vein here and both praise and criticize the most prominent historians who advocate incremental school reform. Eleven years ago, David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s Tinkering toward Utopia appeared, as a short but pithy analysis of top-down school reform efforts. It was not […]
The choice of standardized testing
Last night, I was thinking about the moment in the early- to mid-1970s when state legislatures began experimenting with some form of accountability (as they then termed it, perhaps borrowing from Leon Lessinger, an associate commissioner of education in the Nixon administration). For example, Florida passed something called an accountability act in 1971, Governor Rubin […]
The politics of incrementalism
In the last few hours, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the political viability of incrementalism in school reform. Tyack and Cuban argued for it in Tinkering toward Utopia (1995), and while that’s still very popular, their argument didn’t win the day in school reform. The AYP requirements of No Child Left Behind look […]
Calendars and conferences
By Sherman Dorn on June 7, 2006
I have to make a choice soon about where I’ll be spending my spring 2007 conference time. It’s either the Population Association of America (PAA) March 29-31 (Thu-Sat) or the American Educational Research Association (AERA) April 9-13 (Mon-Fri). Actually, I don’t think I have a choice—as a journal editor, I should go to AERA when […]
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