The third way: the renewal of social democracy

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 9780226734569. pp. 552, $27.50 cloth. Robert J. Sampson’s ...

Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect

Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Mary Patillo-McCoy. Chicago, 1L, and London, UK: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. xii. 276pp. (Cloth US$25.00; PaperUSS15.00)

Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools Diane Ravirch New York: Knopf, 2013. 416 pages. $14-34 USD/Paperbac Diane Ravitch spent decades advocating metrics and alternatives for elementary and secondary public school reform, including some years in government implementing the current assessment-as-accountability regime, but, by 2006, she doubted her own prescription for public school ills. This itch in her mind turned into two books, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, a careful mea culpa regarding testing and a data-driven attack on data-fixation, and, most recently, Reign of Error. As a New York University research professor of education, she also founded an organization, the Network for Public Education (NPE). All of these efforts are aimed fundamentally at the primary and secondary educational systems in the U.S., but the arguments are relevant to community colleges, particularly in the Obama administration. Community colleges today face such questions of "reform"--Ravitch often puts this word in doubtful quotes--and the community college may fall for the same hoax. Ravitch outlines the view of "reformers" in chapters 3-8 of Life and Death and chapters 2-4 and 14-20 of Reign of Error as seeing schools preparing children to become participants in the society's economy. This vision, argues Ravitch, emphasizes two elements: standardized tests and social engineering. Standardized tests are the first social modality by which academic competition is exercised. At this level, a child is getting practice and developing skills that suit one for a competitive economy: self-control, the efficient use of instrumental reason, calculations of utility, innovation, initiative-taking, and so on; but more specifically, job-relevant skills come along eventually, and by assessing disaggregated skills instead of the aggregated judgment that grades make, the system can more precisely sort its future workers. Educational services deliverers get their own grade, from their output--from the scores that their students make, assessed over time. The other element comparative testing emphasizes is a social engineering aspect: that people of differential abilities and aptitudes will be sorted by testing into those career and academic pathways in which they will be comparatively advantaged--on the Adam Smith and David Ricardo model, more or less. Market utility is the appropriate standard of judgment for an individual, according to the reformers' view, because it is the standard of judgment for a collectivity. The strength of corporations (the "bottom line") and countries (military, GDP) is similarly assessed quantitatively. In advanced societies, the citizen labor force is stratified according to performance, which is measured by one "earning what one deserves"--by differential monetary life outcomes. A well-formed education system thus prepares each person for the slot in the economy in which she is most apt to attain her greatest comparative advantage--that which will, among the measurable outcomes, result in her maximum lifetime income-earning potential. Privatization melds public and private interest, in this view, because it allows maximum room for competitive pressures to sort out to any desired level of detail the most efficient producers of society-specific, needed workforce skills. Assessing student learning disaggregated by skill performance facilitates tracking students into the most contributory pathways and prepares them for competitive job-hunting and job-keeping. Similarly, assessing instruction drives teachers and teaching institutions into the most efficient delivery of the most demanded knowledge and skills. Anything that gets in the way of this quantized, data-driven approach is a market inefficiency--as well as, on the reformers' view, a social anachronism and a political albatross. …

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Douglas S. Massey , Nancy A. Denton

The expansion of charter schools continues to be one of the most hotly debated topics in American K–12 education. Through the use of in-depth interviews, this article explores the perceptions of ch...

Exploring the Perspectives of Middle-class African American Parents Who Are Charter School Skeptics:

This article, by examining the planning, development, construction, and operation of the Hiawatha light–rail transit line in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, attempts to further the understanding of c...

Coalition Formation and Metropolitan Contention: An Analysis of the Politics of Light‐Rail Transit in the Twin Cities of Minnesota

Using a case study of Saratoga Springs, NY, and the Saratoga Springs Open Space Project (OSP), this article explores how citizen-led land preservation organizations can form coalitions with diverse...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0160597612458901

Preservationists as Qualitative Growth Actors: A Case Study of Saratoga Springs, New York

This paper explores the experiences of middle-class African American parents who have enrolled their children in a central-city public school district and the factors that inform and contribute to their school enrollment decisions. Data come from nineteen in-depth interviews with middle-class African American parents in Albany, New York. The paper uses the conceptual framework of empowerment and agency to explore and analyze the findings. Findings suggest that middle-class African American parents possess some measure of empowerment based on their human capital and positive childhood experiences in public schools. The latter denotes the salience of emotions in intergenerational education transmission. Parents’ empowerment, however, does not fully extend to agency. Most parents’ school choices have been structured and narrowed by racial segregation in residence and by the real and perceived racial exclusion in private school settings. Therefore, even for highly-educated, middle-income African Americans, anxieties over racial exclusion act as a strong social constraint on parents’ community and school choices.

/pdf/continuing-social-constraints-in-education-agency-the-school-38ns8zks33.pdf

Continuing Social Constraints in Education Agency: The School Choices and Experiences of Middle- Class African American Families in Albany, NY

This article, by analyzing a major development initiative undertaken in upstate New York, seeks to broaden our understanding of a dominant model of economic development: industrial recruitment. Whereas prior studies have examined this model mainly within separate, individual communities, this article broadens the analysis to the regional level and examines how regional economic development organizations can help mediate local political fragmentation that can potentially undermine cross-jurisdictional economic development ventures. With this, we explore how these organizations can exploit the bonding and bridging social ties within and between communities to advance a project, the methods they employ to broaden cross-community consensus regarding a project, and how they can potentially mediate political conflict that may arise as a result of a development venture.

Paul T. Knudson

Papers

Exploring the Perspectives of Middle-class African American Parents Who Are Charter School Skeptics:

Coalition Formation and Metropolitan Contention: An Analysis of the Politics of Light‐Rail Transit in the Twin Cities of Minnesota

Preservationists as Qualitative Growth Actors: A Case Study of Saratoga Springs, New York

Continuing Social Constraints in Education Agency: The School Choices and Experiences of Middle- Class African American Families in Albany, NY

Regional Industrial Recruitment in Upstate New York