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The Flat World And Education: How America's Commitment To Equity Will Determine Our Future (2009)

by Linda Darling-Hammond(Favorite Author)

4.01 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0807749621 (ISBN13: 9780807749623)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Teachers College Press

review 1: Linda Darling-Hammond is one of the most respected education researchers in the country. She has focused on inequalities in education as well as overall best policies for national and state education policies. She led Obama's education development team during his campaign and transition process and should have been given the Secretary of Education position. Unfortunately, big money backed the non-educator pro basketball player, Arne Duncan, and we were sold out. Oh what Darling-Hammond could have done with 4.2 billion dollars!This book and many of Darling-Hammond's other publications accurately defines the current status of American education and proposes a logical research-based plan for future education policies.
review 2: In “The Flat World and Educati... moreon”, Linda Darling-Hammond makes the case for a radical rethinking of American public education. She advocates replacing the “factory” model schools originally designed to train students to function as laborers within an industrial / manufacturing context with “thinking” schools whose aim is to prepare students with the skills necessary to compete in the modern world’s information-driven economy. She advocates a flexible, broad-based approach that deemphasizes standardized test scores and instead aims to encourage students to develop the skills necessary to acquire, interpret and utilize knowledge – skills that are vital for America to remain competitive in the world’s emerging information economy. She argues that the market-based “accountability” and “choice” approaches of the 90’s that informed the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001 has served to narrow (“dumb down”) public school curriculum and actually encouraged schools to dump low performing students (poor, minority and ESL students) in order to achieve better scores on high-stakes standardized math and literacy tests. Adoption of this approach without addressing funding disparities between poor and wealthy neighborhoods, improving teacher and administrator training and quality and the adoption of meaningful curricular standards has helped to exacerbate unequal public school outcomes. Citing as examples the wildly successful systemic methodologies adopted by Finland, South Korea and Singapore over the last 30 to 50 years, she offers an alternative vision of public education that is almost the exact opposite of that created by No Child Left Behind (portions of which, she praises). Rather than teach a limited menu of finite facts that can be later regurgitated on standardized multiple-choice tests, Darling-Hammond advocates for approaches that encourage the acquisition, interpretation and use of knowledge. While her proposed program covers a number of different topics, her central insight is informed by the belief that teacher quality is the primary determinant of student outcomes – more important even that socioeconomic background or class size. Successive years of study under high-quality teachers, she argues, produces high-achieving students, while students who study year in and year out under ill-trained teachers working on provisional credentials (which is a common practice in underfunded districts) produces correspondingly bad outcomes. Central to her vision is a corps of highly motivated, exquisitely well-educated, meticulously well - trained educators who are granted the freedom and flexibility to assess gaps and devise approaches that are responsive to their students’ unique needs. Although by no means central to her work, I thought it was interesting that the fact that America has dropped from first place to middle (or, in some measures, near the bottom) of the pack on most measures of educational quality, this does not mean that America fails to produce fine scholars. Well-funded public schools situated in affluent communities and filled with middle-class and wealthy students produce kids who can credibly compete with students from any other country. Our drop in these international rankings, however, is due in part to the growth of income inequality and expanding minority and ESL populations. In other words, rich kids are doing just fine, while poorer kids are struggling – as the income inequality gap has gotten wider and wider over successive generations while our funding of schools in poor and working class neighborhoods has remained the same or gotten worse, the effect of this higher population of underperforming students on international test scores, when viewed for the nation as a whole, has been correspondingly awful. What this says is that not only are the poor getting poorer, but given the pace of educational inequality, they can look forward to staying poor for the remainder of their lives. I had become interested in “education” as a result of other reading I’d done, and selected “Flat World” because it has been favorably reviewed by a very large number of readers. While I found the book intriguing, I’m afraid that much of it was over my head. Darling-Hammond has a habit of introducing new concepts with a brief description of the problem, and then goes on for pages and pages about the proposed remedy. I am not an educator, and in many cases I felt as though I simply lacked the context, experience and knowledge necessary to critically evaluate her principal ideas. After I finished “Flat World”, I went on to read Diane Ravich’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”. As Ravich’s book, in addition to being full of suggestions for educational reform, is also a history of the philosophical schools of thought that have evolved around public education over the last 50 years, I’m finding it’s providing much of the context that was not provided in “Flat World”. In retrospect, I wish I had read Ravich prior to reading Darling-Hammond, and now that I’m almost done with “Death and Life”, I find myself wanting to go back to “Flat World” to figure out what I missed on the first pass. less

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