Customer Reviews

It Takes a City

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It takes a ... what? It takes more than this book recognizes to improve education. The rhetoric here implies that the so-called "reform" movement is the way to cure school ills. To most teachers, however, this is simply another year's bureaucratic fad to morph educators into paper pushers. Although I found several insights here, and detailed information on six inner-city school districts, I was somewhat amazed by two important omissions: teachers and students. Teacher unions were trivialized by the suggestion that each little school decide, on their own, if they want to unionize.The writer recommends "hiring halls" for teachers, putting us on a level with farm workers and factory hands. This writing shows absolutely no understanding about why teachers need unions or how such organizations originated.

This writer clearly identifies a target audience -- mayors, civic leaders and school board members. By decision, it excludes teachers and students. It's sad to think -- and I've seen this happen -- that ivory tower bureaucrarts actually make decisions based on this type of dubious theory rather than getting down in the trenches with the reality of the classroom.

Content here is peppered with educratic jargon which twists other terminology into bastardized educational theories. School "incubators" make me think of premature babies."Real dollar budgets" make me wonder if bureaucrats are playing Monopoly with our taxes. "CEO Strong Schools strategy" pretends that a principal, who is middle management, is a CEO. Get real. The only CEO in the school district is the superintendent who is hired by an elected school board.

This book, to it's credit, recognizes the inability of reform to reform anything (last paragraph, page 84). Any good book offers new insights and "policy churn" gets my prize here. Teachers are jaded by bandwagon bureaucrats who recycle new versions of old ideas, one after another, never saying, "stop this" or "drop that."

Hillary Clinton quotes the African proverb, "It Takes a Village." This book spins the idea into, "a city." I'm waiting for the next trendy realization for someone to discover that, "It takes a teacher."