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Someone Has to Fail : The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling

Compare to estimated retail price: S$57.16  

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Someone Has to Fail : The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling - Thryft
Someone Has to Fail : The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling - Thryft

Educational dysfunction explained: Someone Has to Fail

This book is a must-read for educators and policy-makers alike. Labaree delves into the historical roots of the American education system, unearthing the reasons for its many dysfunctions and contradictions. The book provides a comprehensive overview of how the system is organized, how it works, and why it's so hard to change. It is especially useful for understanding why schools fail to live up to the promises made by politicians and educators.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Someone Has to Fail : The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling

Compare to estimated retail price: S$57.16  

The item you've got your eye on is secondhand. You probably already know that, but just in case!

The estimated retail price shown next to any listed item represents the first-hand prices we've seen elsewhere, or the estimated original retail price of a comparable item of the same quality, construction and material offered elsewhere in new condition.

Condition guide

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ISBN: 9780674063860
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Date of Publication: 2012-04-02
Format: Paperback
Goodreads rating: 3.89
(rated by 185 readers)

Description

What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children-but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way "this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do."

Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult.

At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes-to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own.

Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.


Author: David F. Labaree
Format: Paperback
Number of Pages: 312
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication Date: 02 May 2012
 

Educational dysfunction explained: Someone Has to Fail

This book is a must-read for educators and policy-makers alike. Labaree delves into the historical roots of the American education system, unearthing the reasons for its many dysfunctions and contradictions. The book provides a comprehensive overview of how the system is organized, how it works, and why it's so hard to change. It is especially useful for understanding why schools fail to live up to the promises made by politicians and educators.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.