Empowering Teachers and Parents: School Restructuring Through the Eyes of Anthropologists

(Paperback)

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An examination of the impact on teachers and parents of the effort to improve schools through restructuring, this book looks at professionalisation and parent empowerment programmes from the ground level rather than from the large-scale policy level. The editor, active in both policy setting and monitoring implementation, approaches the subject with an overarching view that weaves together a set of diverse case studies that examine some of the most notable efforts in this area of school reform. The first section demonstrates the tremendous difficulties involved in attempting to reshape the culture of public school teaching, noting both institutional resistance to change and the personal resistance of the professionals who are, in theory, being empowered through this approach. The second section details the problems of launching parent empowerment opportunities, in a large urban setting, and a contrasting case examines the choice of enrolment option. These studies examine the effectiveness of these programmes. The conclusion reflects on the opportunities such innovations provide for researchers and assesses the importance of such research in shaping the innovations themselves through evaluations while they are in process.

Reviews

"This collection of essays pries open a much needed conversation about the politics of public sector educational reform. In the midst of George Bush's press for privatization, vouchers, and 'choice, ' few reformers or reform voyeurs, have had enough chutzpah to raise up the tough, controversial issues inside reform movements. Collectively these essays do just that. They address a terribly significant set of concerns about what's possible in the public sphere, and what it would take to sustain radical transformation of public schooling. As the first text to analyze critically a wide range of public sector 'reform experiments, ' the authors leave no one off the hook. Parents, unions, central districts, principals, superintendents, teachers, policy makers, reformers, and researchers are all positioned critically in relation to reform, and all invited to re-examine our relationship to educational restructuring."-Michelle Fine University of Pennsylvania

Author Bio

G. ALFRED HESS, JR. is Executive Director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance. One of the principal activists of the school reform effort in Chicago, his organization sponsored one of the three major pieces of legislation that constituted the Chicago School Reform Act and is also the primary independent monitor of the implementation of this act. He is the author of Restructuring Schools: Chicago Style and numerous articles.