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Teachers and Crisis: Urban School Reform and Teachers' Work Culture (Critical Social Thought)
Teachers and Crisis Urban School Reform and Teachers' Work Culture - Critical Social Thought Author:Dennis Carlson In Teachers and Crisis, Dennis Carlson analyzes teachers' work culture during the past several decades to indicate how it has entered into the power dynamics of crisis and crisis management in urban education. Specifically, he addresses the role of teacher unions in organizing teachers' interests and orchestrating their response to a state-spons... more »ored "basic skills" reform movement--a movement designed to manage crisis tendencies which further disempowered teachers. Behind these research interests lies a broader concern with teachers as political actors and cultural workers, the restructuring of teachers' work, and the potential role of teachers in building a democratic oppositional discourse on the urban school crisis. Teachers and Crisisis both theoretical and empirical in its analysis of the situation we confront in urban education. Carlson begins by providing a general conceptual framework for understanding crisis tendencies in urban education and urban school reform. He proceeds with an ethnographic study of both an urban school district in the New York metropolitan area and a district in a Mid-Atlantic state. The particular focus of Carlson's study is the back-to-basics movement. Instruction has been increasingly organized around "basic skills" as schools attempt to educate students to the minimum level of literacy required to enter the labor force. Carlson argues that an exclusive emphasis on functional literacy skills rather than high-order thinking assures that students will remain on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.« less