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In Confessions of a School Reformer, eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. Cuban begins his own story in the 1930s, when he entered first grade at a Pittsburgh public school, the youngest son of Russian immigrants who placed great stock in the promises of education. With a keen historian's eye, Cuban expands his personal narrative to analyze the overlapping social, political, and economic movements that have attempted to influence public schooling in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. He documents how education both has and has not been ...
Impelled by a demand for increasing American strength in the new global economy, many educators, public officials, business leaders, and parents argue that school computers and Internet access will improve academic learning and prepare students for an information-based workplace. But just how valid is this argument? In Oversold and Underused, one of the most respected voices in American education argues that when teachers are not given a say in how the technology might reshape schools, computers are merely souped-up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry C...
Film and radio, television, and computers have each been heralded by reformers as a way to revolutionize classroom instruction by increasing productivity. “The promises implied in these aids caught educators’ attention: individualized instruction, relief from tedium of repetitive activities, and presentation of content beyond what was available to a classroom teacher.” How have teachers responded to the promise of improvement? To answer this question, Larry Cuban has gathered evidence from many diverse sources, constructing a history of technology and education that reveals hidden or ignored patterns in the teacher-machine courtship. He traces cycles of acceptance and denial; the enthusiasm of reformers; the initial optimism of the educational community; the hesitancy, doubts, and frustrations of teachers; and the very slow and limited acceptance of the new technology. He also asks, Why have so few teachers used machines? His answers, drawing from a range of disciplines, will prod readers into viewing the current passion for classroom computers in a different light. This now classic text provides a much-needed perspective on technology in the classroom.
For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices. In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patt...
With this significant new work, Larry Cuban provides a unique and insightful perspective on the bridging of the long-standing and well-known gap between teachers and administrators. Drawing on the literature of the field as well as personal experience, Cuban recognizes the enduring structural relationship within school organizations inherited by teachers, principals, and superintendents, and calls for a renewal of their sense of common purpose regarding the role of schooling in a democratic society. Cuban analyzes the dominant images (moral and technical), roles (instructional, managerial, and political), and contexts (classroom, school, and district) within which teachers, principals, and s...
In Teaching History Then and Now, Larry Cuban explores the teaching of history in American high schools during the past half-century. Focusing on two high schools where he once taught--Cleveland's Glenville High School and Washington DC's Cardozo High School--Cuban augments his recollections of and research on the featured schools with a sweeping, nationwide account of the field. The result is exemplary education research, capturing the gritty facts of classroom practice and the larger currents of policy, institutional, and national change. "Teaching History Then and Now takes us back into the classrooms where Cuban himself taught, in the 1950s and 1960s, then brings us into the same schools...
In an incisive examination of the cliché that schools should be more businesslike, the author demonstrates why no one has shown that a business model can be successfully applied to education.
In the first edition of this seminal study, Larry Cuban presented the last century of American teaching as one of a stable teacher-centered pedagogy. Within this framework, Cuban explored how major school reform efforts to alter classroom teaching often resulted in modest shifts in pedagogy in elementary schools and even less change in secondary schools.Now, in this second edition, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1990, Larry Cuban returns to his pioneering inquiry into the history of teaching practice in the United States, responds to criticisms, and incorporates the scholarship of the last ten years. While not abandoning his basic thesis of the remar...
Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice takes as its starting point a strikingly blunt question: "With so many major structural changes in U.S. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices been largely stable, with a modest blending of new and old teaching practices, leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations of school-goers?" It is a question that ought to be of paramount interest to all who are interested in school reform in the United States. It is also a question that comes naturally to Larry Cuban, whose much-admired books have focused on various aspects of school reform--their promises, wrong turns, partial successes, and troubling f...
Providing a strong counter voice to today's standards-based reform, this book features powerful ideas on teacher education, curriculum, and school administration in an accessible lecture style by Larry Cuban, an experienced teacher, administrator, and acclaimed author. Based on Cuban's Julius and Rosa Sachs Lectures for 2001-2002, this volume is a must-read for everyone interested in improving our schools.