Cutting Through the Hype: A Tax-payer's Guide to School Reforms.

Cutting Through the Hype: A Taxpayer's Guide to School Reforms. Jane L. David and Larry Cuban (Education Week Press).

Silver bullets come not here. In this slender, readable volume, veteran educators Jane David (now head of the Bay Area Research Group) and Larry Cuban (emeritus education professor at Stanford) conduct a break-neck tour of almost--but not quite--every prominent education-reform idea of the past decade or two and say what they like and dislike about each. Clustered in three parts ("reforming the system," "reforming how schools are organized," "reforming teaching and learning"), some 20 reforms are on their itinerary. They neither fully embrace nor entirely dismiss any of them. The devil, as always, lurks in the details, and K-12 education is sufficiently complex that thoroughly reworking it calls for numerous complementary and more or less concurrent actions. Notwithstanding the promise of the book's subtitle, the authors view these reform options through the eyes of practitioners--teachers and principals, mostly--rather than those of taxpayers, policymakers, or parents. Fittingly, they also treat more kindly the change strategies that try to strengthen practitioners than they treat those that seek to alter the ground rules or power relationships of the system itself. They are cautious incrementalists, not bomb throwers or bold innovators. But they've written a useful reform primer, which seems to have been the point.

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