How Integration Matters: An Alternative Vision for Urban Education in an Era of the Market

ABSTRACT

The widespread assumption in the United States today is that traditional urban public schools are failing. Market-based solutions, particularly charter schools, are seen as the way to improve urban education. How then can we understand a large urban district where educational actors have furthered a locally popular alternative vision? This article analyzes the comparison of Indianapolis, IN and Louisville, KY to demonstrate how four-decades-old desegregation orders continue to matter for the perceptions of urban school districts. The analysis shows how actors in Louisville utilized more favorable perceptions to fight for a compelling alternative narrative–integration–and against charter schools.     

The corporatizing and privatizing of schooling: A call for grounded critical praxis

Our review of Henry Giroux's Stealing Innocence , Alex Molnar's Giving Kids the Business , and Kenneth Saltman's Collateral Damage describes how these authors assess the problems posed by contemporary corporate influences on public schools and considers the solutions they offer to counter those influences. We also examine Henry Levin's edited collection Privatizing Education , in which various authors address research on privatization in schooling. In our analysis of this book, we highlight the underlying themes of the wide-ranging chapters. Next, we critique all four books, focusing primarily on the books by Giroux, Molnar, and Saltman. We suggest that these three authors provide a somewhat totalized and ahistorical portrait of contemporary corporate influences on schooling and offer a solution that depends on teachers acting as democratic revolutionaries, though there is no realistic possibility that teachers today would take on this role. In contrast, we call for a critical theory and practice that is grounded both in a more complex understanding of the current historical context and also in a dialogical engagement with students, teachers, parents, and other community members.     

Book reviews

International Review of Education -     

Teaching nature of science within a controversial topic: Integrated versus nonintegrated

This study investigated the influence of two different explicit instructional approaches in promoting more informed understandings of nature of science (NOS) among students. Participants, a total of 42 students, comprised two groups in two intact sections of ninth grade. Participants in the two groups were taught environmental science by their regular classroom teacher, with the difference being the context in which NOS was explicitly taught. For the “integrated” group, NOS instruction was related to the science content about global warming. For the “nonintegrated” group, NOS was taught through a set of activities that specifically addressed NOS issues and were dispersed across the content about global warming. The treatment for both groups spanned 6 weeks and addressed a unit about global warming and NOS. An open‐ended questionnaire, in conjunction with semistructured interviews, was used to assess students' views before and after instruction. Results showed improvements in participants' views of NOS regardless of whether NOS was integrated within the regular content about global warming. Comparison of differences between the two groups showed “slightly” greater improvement in the informed views of the integrated group participants. On the other hand, there was greater improvement in the transitional views of the nonintegrated group participants. Therefore, the overall results did not provide any conclusive evidence in favor of one approach over the other. Implications on the teaching and learning of NOS are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 395–418, 2006     

Discursive Dancing: Traditionalism and Social Realism in the 2013 English History Curriculum Wars

This paper is an exploration of the debates surrounding the publication of a new National Curriculum for history in England. The draft curriculum was published in February 2013 and was withdrawn just 6 months later in the face of considerable opposition. This paper offers a tentative explanation for this example of a rare phenomenon: effective resistance to curriculum change. Using a socio-cognitive approach to discourse analysis, the paper explores the context models of the two antagonists in the contestation: new right traditionalism and social realism. While both context models are viewed as coherent, it is suggested that critics of the draft prevailed because they more fully comprehended the context model of their opponents and were prepared to adapt their strategy accordingly. The paper takes an analytical narrative approach to the contestation. Resistance to the draft is presented in two phases: an initial phase in which criticism was diffuse, instinctive and political; and a more effective mature phase in which opposition united around a depoliticised disciplinary defence of the subject in social realist terms. It is argued that this deft shift went unnoticed by Education Secretary, Michael Gove, rendering ineffective his attacks on his critics as ‘Marxists’ and ‘progressives’.