Ray C. Rist

Blitzkrieg Ethnography: On the Transformation of a Method into a Movement

In retrospect, it seems rather inevitable. What had been a quiet and perhaps peripheral aspect of educational research has moved rapidly to center stage. Ethnographic research on American education has heretofore been the activity of a small band of researchers, overwhelmingly trained in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. But at present, it is finding widespread application among researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. And with this newfound popularity has come the mutation of both its epistemological underpinnings and its methodological applications.

On the Future of School Desegregation

If interpreting history is fraught with difficulties, ambiguities, and subject to multiple interpretation, how much more likely are probes into the future like looking into a prism. Yet in the context of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Brown 1 decision, it is important to assess not only what progress has been made toward racial equality but to look forward down the paths we are taking.

On the Limits of Social Science Evidence: Educational Policy Making and the Courts.

As courts increasingly make de facto public policy, what is the appropriate role for the social scientist?

Book Review: Growing up SuburbanGrowing Up SuburbanWynneEdward A.. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1977, xiv + 236 pp.

undermines the books value. Indeed, the distortions most of which are implicit actually serve to leave readers, who can well be distressed by the facts, less well-equipped to foster constructive change. We are simply presented with another instance in which the perfect is the enemy of the good. As some writers have observed elsewhere, the utopian longings especially peculiar to modern intellectuals have profound implications for practical social policy. Perhaps this book is only another instance of those implications. For a broader consideration of this important matter of utopianism and social policy, see Irving Kristol, Utopianism, Ancient and Modern, The Alternative (June-September, 1974), pp. 5-9; Edward Wynne, Utopianism and Education, The Journal of Educational Thought, 10,3 (December 1976), pp. 169-178.