The American Dream and the Public Schools

By Jennifer L. Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick

Book Overview

Why is education policy so contentious? Do conflicts over specific issues in schooling have anything in common? Are there general principles that can help us resolve these disputes? In this book the authors find the source of many debates over schooling in the multiple goals and internal
contradictions of the national ideology we call the American dream. They also propose a framework for helping Americans get past acrimonious debates in order to help all children learn.
The American Dream and the Public Schools examines issues that have excited and divided Americans for years, including desegregation, school funding, testing, vouchers, bilingual education, multicultural education, and ability grouping. These seem to be separate problems, but much of the
contention over them comes down to the same thing--an apparent conflict, rooted in the American dream, between policies designed to promote each student's ability to pursue success and those designed to insure the good of all students or the nation as a whole. The authors show how policies to
promote individual success too often benefit only those already privileged by race or class, and too often conflict, unnecessarily, with policies that are intended to benefit everyone. The book also examines issues such as creationism and Afrocentrism, where the disputes lie between those who
attack the validity of the American dream and those who believe that such a challenge has no place in the public schools. At the end of the book, the authors examine the impact of our nation's rapid racial and ethnic transformation on the pursuit of all of these goals, and they propose ways to make
public education work better to help all children succeed and become the citizens we need.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195152786
• ISBN13: 9780195152784
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.6" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Must read for anyone involved in education public policy

It is very refreshing to find a work that illuminates many of the major issues and debates in education public policy in a clear and cogent way. Hochschild and Scovronick should be commended for fairly presenting multiple viewpoints, the history of the issue where appropriate, and relevant and reputable research that sheds light on the matters. I especially like the section on school financing which shows the weakness of the silly assertion that additional money would not help improve the quality of public schools, but also explains why major school finance reform is so difficult.