Joseph P. Farrell

Why Is Educational Reform so Difficult? Similar Descriptions, Different Prescriptions, Failed Explanations

David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia; A Century of Public School Reform Diane Ravitch and Maris A. Vinovskis (eds.), Learning From the Past: What History Teaches Us About School Reform

Can We Really Change the Forms of Formal Schooling? And Would it Make a Difference if We Could?

Just after I had finished reading all the pieces in this issue as preparation for writing this essay, there appeared in my mail the Fall 2001 edition of Harpers Magazine. Its central theme, as announced on the cover, is “New Hope for American Education,” and it contains long commentary and brief quotations on the state of education in the United States from a chronologically and ideologically wide-ranging collection of “eminent observers” of the educational scene: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mona Simpson, Jacques Barzun, Cristina Nehring, Theodore Sizer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Stewart, John Taylor Gatto, Woodrow Wilson, Garret Keizer, Kristin Kearns Jordan, Diane Ravitch, Frank Gannon, the Lynds, Martin Luther, Horace Mann, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, Cotton Mather, and others. Quite a diverse assemblage, in time and point of view! The issue contains a lot of interesting and well-spoken observations, some already quite familiar to me, others not. But what most struck me while reading this very recent edition of a “major American magazine” in conjunction with having just read (in most cases re-read) at a single sitting all of the contributions to this edition of our journal is that the theme of Harpers’ education-focused issue could better have been titled not “New Hope for American Education” but rather “Old Ideas About American Education.” From the two feature articles in this edition and the three book review essays it becomes clear that these “new hope” ideas chronicled and discussed in Harpers are really not much more than, as my mother-in-law often said, “mutton dressed up as lamb” or, as my own mother (alive, alert, and thriving at age 86, God bless her!) often says, “the same old warmed over soup.” There is something to such folk sayings and folk wisdom; they hang around so long because they capture things that we all “know in our bones” to be true.

On Learning Civic Virtue: Can Schooling Really Play a Role?

There is so much one might talk about in the contributions to this issue. The extensive “dialogue” among Roth, Lawless, Solway, Beck and Kosnik, on the question of “reflection in action” vs. Spielraum (room to maneuver) is utterly fascinating, and reminded me of many vignettes from my own practice of learning facilitation among the young Scouts, with whom I have worked for so many years, all worthy of some backward reflection. What immediately sprang to my mind was a cold and drizzly Friday evening, many years ago. We were trying to get a campfire going for the final night of what had been the worst, coldest, and dampest week of “summer” camping with Scouts that I ever (before and since) experienced. As always the kids had made of this miserable week a fun time, with some help from me, and had collectively judged the week a great success. As I was working with several of the most experienced lads to get a roaring fire going out of a stack of very damp wood (everything and everybody was very damp and chilly), my eyes tearing heavily in the smoke, one kid asked, quite out of nowhere contextually, in a very loud and earnest voice, “Hey, Joe. Some of us were talking last night. Is masturbation a sin?” Whoa! Quick assessment of situation! I knew that several of these boys came from very conservative religious backgrounds, a couple had parents who were basically aging flower children from the 1960s, and the rest had families at some stage in between those value and attitude sets. The question could not be ignored; from what I knew (and know) of the kinds of issues and questions that arise in this age-stage of emerging sexuality, I had to take it seriously, however odd the timing; but I had also to acknowledge and respect the widely varying familial and formal religious traditions from which these kids came, and be “true” to my own set of beliefs. (And the situation was complicated by the fact that my own, then 12-year-old, son was part of this group, undoubtedly alert to what dad would say.) I think I did manage a sensible and helpful response, which led to a rather strange (in terms of location and timing)

Means, Ends and Dead‐Ends in Thinking about School Change

There is a very sad, but for present purposes quite instructive, story which the well-known U.S. economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, tells in his memoirs. At the end of the Second World War, he was head of a team dispatched by the U.S. government, first to Germany, and then to Japan, to do an economic assessment of the effects of the massive “strategic bombing” campaigns against those two nations. The objective of “strategic bombing” was, it was claimed, to damage or destroy key elements of enemy nations’ war production capacity, and thus weaken their ability to wage the war. It was originally assumed that such “strategic targets” would include things like factories which manufactured munitions and key parts (say, ball bearings), petroleum and other chemical refineries, key elements of transportation infrastructure (say, key railway yards and junctions, important bridges, and such). The task of the evaluation team was to determine whether the massive strategic bombing campaigns had actually had their intended effect—had war production in Germany and Japan actually been impaired to any significant degree? After months of study the team’s answer was simple: NO! In Germany, throughout the strategic bombing campaign war production had actually regularly and steadily increased. In Japan the estimated effect was minimal—at best it might have shortened the war by a couple of months. Thus, many cities were destroyed (one thinks immediately of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin), millions of civilians were killed, or seriously injured, or dislocated (and of course many thousands of airmen lost their lives delivering those bombs), all to no discernible effect. What went so terribly wrong? The answer, it turned out, was simple. It was a classic case of means/ends confusion; the generals planning the bombing campaigns became so entranced with and committed to their “tools” (bombs and bombers) that they lost sight of the ultimate strategic objective—weakening the enemy’s war production capacity. Over Germany, until very late in the war, most of the available bombers could fly, with some degree of safety, only at night. In the dark they could not locate precise targets, but they could locate large

Big Issues in Small Places

Of the four contributions to this issue of Curriculum Inquiry, two deal with educational and curriculum issues in quite small locations. The first article, by Janna Fox, refers to an island state that has about 55,000 citizens living on three islands, but mostly on the main island, but having, by accidents of colonial history, three different languages to deal with in the schools: French, English, and the local Creole (which, from Fox’s Appendix 5, appears to me to be more firmly rooted in French than in English). David Gordon’s response to an article that we have previously published by Majid Al-Haj refers to history textbooks and teaching in Israel. Although Israel is far larger in population than the small island state to which Fox refers, it is still, in the grand scheme of things, quite a small place geographically but also riven by linguistic, religious, and cultural divisions. From my own experience, both my own life and the lives of the students I’ve worked with and of the people I know in other realms of my being, it seems clear to me that most of us who live (as most of the readers of this journal do) in places that are very heavily populated or large in territory (Canada is a bit of an exception; one of our former prime ministers once joked that Canada’s main problem was that we had too few people and too much geography!) have great difficulty coming to an understanding of what it is like to live and work in a really small place. It is not that the problems around education are fundamentally different; it’s just that they necessarily work out differently in smaller places than we are accustomed to. We may have some sort of intellectual understanding of the situation, but given our own life experience, we can’t really “get it.” I first got a strong personal sense of this in the early 1980s, when I was given the task by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, Canada, to work for a few weeks with the Ministry of Education of a small island state (in this case, about twice the population of the place

The Use and Abuse of Comparative Studies of Educational Achievement

This is a rather unusual issue of Curriculum Inquiry. We don’t “do” “special issues” on a single theme. We have, rather, developed what we call “special series” that involve connected sets of articles running over many issues and many years, but these are subthemes to the main purpose of our journal, which is simply to publish the best of what we receive within the space limits we have, whatever their particular thematic focus. We do stimulate dialogue by inviting comments and critiques of major articles and reviews, but these “dialogues” often spread over two or more issues of the journal. Yet this one seems very much like a “special issue” as usually conceived in other journals. There is also much more “highly technical measurement and evaluation” content, and even complex mathematical equations, in several of the contributions, than one would normally find in an issue of this journal. We didn’t plan it this way exactly, but here is how it all evolved. When we received the original version of Howard Russell’s article, we were immediately interested as it raises a set of questions and doubts about the technical validity and policy uses of international testing regimes, focusing particularly on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which is part of the most recent round of such international studies organized for almost 50 years now by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). As importantly, perhaps, Russell does this in a language that is accessible to the “nontechnical specialist.” National or state/provincial “scores” on these kinds of international testing programs have now become an extremely important aspect of the “landscape” (in narrative terms) within which educational practitioners and policymakers work. Cross-national “league tables” of test results are avidly reported in the general media and more specialized

Who Are We And Where Are We Going? An Analysis of Patterns of Development in a New Academic Institution.

The first part of this paper introduces a method for identifying the major patterns or trends of an institution. This method rests upon the identification of concrete decisions which are perceived as highly significant by individuals representing various segments of an institution. In the second part of the paper the method is applied to a recently established graduate school and research and development center. Five major institutional patterns which have characterized the development of this institution are identified and discussed: 1) democratization, 2) centralization of decision-making over research and development funds, 3) legitimation of development and implementation activities, 4) growth, and 5) entrenchment.Finally, the relevance of the findings is discussed in reference to all institutions of higher education; institutions which are faced with demands for broader participation on the one hand and increasing accountability on the other.