Search - Respect for Teachers: The Rhetoric Gap and How Research on Schools is Laying the Ground for New Business Models in Education (Michael A Peter Series Critical Issues in Education and Politics (RLE))

Respect for Teachers The Rhetoric Gap and How Research on Schools is Laying the Ground for New Business Models in Education - Michael A Peter Series Critical Issues in Education and Politics RLE
Author: Brian Ford

For the last 30 years we have been in the midst of a paradox. In the discourse on education reform, national attention in the US has focused on how to improve the education system as a means to keep the US from slipping in international economic competition. It the end we may have actually done the opposite ? made the US less competitive economi...  more »cally, with a system that has gotten worse at its core, in its philosophical tenets and in its ultimate effect on children and young adults, by placing unwonted pressure on them and in stifling their creativity.

Still, claims that the public schools in the US are failing are rampant. The teacher evaluation system is broken. America is being out-educated. The bottom rank of teachers are beyond redemption. New, effective teachers can eliminate the achievement gap in four years, but they aren't given the chance because our education system is in the thrall of teachers unions, ignores our children and emphasizes 'adult interests.' 'Respect for Teachers,' which takes its title from a phrase President Obama used in a State of the Union address, examines these claims, looking first at the rhetoric and the research that supposedly backs it up. It argues that most of this is not only wrong, but endangers both the egalitarian basis of democracy and broad-based forms of learning which promote creative and critical thinking.

But what is the source? Money changes everything and the books suggests, on the one hand, that we are all connected to money. On the other hand, research on education has been systematically misreported, presenting a bleaker picture overall while ignoring the central problem: our schools are failing in areas of concentrated poverty. It does so by looking at how research is presented, the gap between rhetoric and research and how one hand might be washing the other.

Working as if from a common script, private interests present a false picture. Schooling is big business, after all -- two trillion dollars world-wide. Joseph Schumpeter once said, ?No bourgeoisie ever disliked war profits.? One would assume no bourgeoisie ever disliked the spoils of school reform, either.  « less

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ISBN-13: 9781475802078
ISBN-10: 1475802072
Publication Date: 12/16/2012
Pages: 258
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Publisher: R&L Education
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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