HR: 1330h
AN: ED13A-01    [Abstracts]
TI: Reforming Educational Reform: A Democratic Perspective
AU: * Green, J
EM: tyhci@yahoo.com
AF: Louisiana State University in Shreveport, PO Box 596, Harrisonburg, LA 71340
AB: This essay examines the status of educational reform in the United States as represented by the current Bush administration's program titled "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). Employing the techniques of critical theory and logical analysis, contemporary reform efforts are compared with other, more progressive, educational reform movements in an effort to gain perspective and conceptual "traction" as it were, in differentiating such movements. Criteria are established for the assessment and evaluation of reform movements. These are employed in judging the efficacy of NCLB's aim, content, and methods, as well as the results of its program following four years of implementation. The merits of the centrality of standardized testing, pre-ordained curricular content, and exclusively didactic teaching methodologies are criticized, along with the extra-school societal forces which ordain these and determine their prominence in the NCLB program. The essentialism adopted by NCLB is, moreover, evaluated in the light of pragmatic, phenomenological, and postmodern educational theory. Arguing that the school is always and inevitably an instrument of societal forces, interests, and groups, it is contended that these not only be acknowledged, but that avenues be formalized for a thorough going and continuous educational "conversation," to borrow Rorty's term, for an amicable resolution of the issues of education's aim(s), content, and methods.
DE: 0840 Evaluation and assessment
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly