Change being the only constant can also be applied to the American school system which is always subject to reform in order to reach a point in which citizens can contribute to a “utopian” society as mentioned in the article. However, as suggested in the article, this ‘tinkering’ towards utopia may not be entirely negatively and there may not be a definite point for this utopia; instead it may just a process with no definite end. Some of the key points mentioned in this article include some of the concepts mentioned in the book such as “policy talk”, “policy action” and “implementation of change” which are all varying degrees of making concrete change in America’s education system. Lastly, the point of “decentralization, deregulation and choice as a cure to what is wrong in education” as stated by businessman, Pete DuPont undermines the speculation of what degree of reform the education system needs. This article helps me understand teaching and learning through inquiry because as future educators we need to question policies regarding school reform because they will actively affect our students and classrooms. Whether we are in favor of a top-down or bottom-up approaches to school reform, they will both trickle down to our classrooms. Which then compels us to ask what is happening in our school districts and how will it affect me and my students?
When first reading this article, I found it very convoluted and not very informational. It seemed as though the author of this summary was writing just to praise the authors of the book, Tinkering Toward Utopia, and only did a cursory view of what was discussed in the book. I don’t feel as if I truly understand what the book was about. That being said, I do believe what I could pinpoint about the book was very insightful. It seemed to give a broad view of the United States educational system, past and present, and how ideas and theories have changed. For example, in the past, many businessmen, like Pierre DuPont, believed that centralization of schools would improve education immensely. Now, businessmen believe the exact opposite. I think it is interesting to see the growth and change in opinion over time. It shows that as a teacher, I will never stop learning. There will always be new material and teaching methods for me to absorb, as well as new experiences in the classroom with students every year, even every day. I also think it is important to pinpoint that the book discusses standardized testing, and how the United States stacks up internationally. This is a widely and repeatedly discussed topic today. I think, if anything, this summary made me want to read the book to actually get a sense of what it is about; this may or may not have been the purpose of the summary, but either way, it worked.
Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform
What I found interesting about this article was when Tyack and Cuban talk about the United States competing internationally. Seventy-five percent of the U.S. student population was compared with the top nine percent of students in West Germany in math and science assessments. I see something wrong here! How is this possible? We not only were compared with West Germany, but with the top thirteen percent of the students in the Netherlands and the top forty-five percent of the students in Sweden. Then people wonder why we are so behind! I don’t think these comparisons help us in any way, I don’t even want to imagine how off the numbers would be.
Something that this article made me think about is the lives students live outside of school. What’s the real reason students are falling behind and failing? Is it because of the teachers? Or is it because they choose to not achieve anything in life? Is a reform really needed in the schools? I wish I had the answer to all of these questions. Sometimes I wonder if the younger generations are just becoming more corrupted and not willing to learn. Seems like school administrations and teachers are being blamed for the failure of students and for the lack of education in the entire country! Maybe researchers should look into the life of students and the effort they put into their education.
After reading the article there were 3 different parts the stuck out to me: 1. “Professors Tyack and Cuban start with the proposition that Americans have long seen their schools as a major agency for building a better society by enriching the skills, learning, and viewpoints of its citizens. They then lead us from these utopian dreams to the realization that perfecting schools has been, and continues to be, a slow game,…”
2. “Tyack and Cuban point out that international comparisons of student achievement are plagued by problems of non-equivalence among groups of students taking the exams.
3. “Many of the insights the authors identify about the roles of teachers, parents, and students come from a relatively new breed of education researchers, who spend time in schools and classrooms rather than seeking generalizations about schooling by interpreting national data streams — a useful addition to the analysis of schooling.”
Part one stuck out to me because I completely agree with the fact that many people view school as a place to start to build a better society. The following sentence then gives the actuality that this is an extremely slow process that many people have been trying to do. Part two suck out to me because I have heard about this before. I understand this problem to be that the US is testing all of its children while other countries are only testing there top percentage of students and therefore producing betters grades. Why then is this not addressed when discussing that other countries are testing better then the US? Part three stuck out to me because I did know that about educational researchers. In my Biochemistry class there is a graduate student who sits in and watches Dr. Parkin teach our class. Her study is based on Dr. Parkin’s use of Inquiry based activities (POGL) for us to learn the daunting material. As a student in his classroom I find the exercise to be extremely frustrating and difficult. I’m not sure why this is since I understood inquiry teaching to be a way of teaching.
After reading this article i realized i did not learn anything new. All that it points out is the obvious. Don't we all know that the system needs to be changed and that other nations perform better that Americans on tests and in general? Yes we know that America is racially diverse and we need to incorporate everyone in order to succeed.But talking about the authors and how great they are wont help us in this reform. I didn't like that the author of this article talks how Tyack's and Cuban's had this great ideas instead of the ideas themselves. Pointing out the strengths of the book, by the author, taught me that reforms are important and that as a teacher i will be actively searching how to improve educational system in general, as well as, search how to improve educational system in my classroom.
Key Points: perfecting schools = “slow game” international testing - not the most important reasons contrasts in reform efforts “large-scale frenetic adoption of quickly conceived proposals, some old and some new, has become the mainstream of current school reform” Teachers role in reform
This article helps me to better understand teaching and learning through inquiry because not only do we need to use inquiry with our students but with ourselves. There is a need for teachers to be curious about what is happening around them and to ask questions and be involved. For any reform to occur it must be implemented through the teachers and we as a teachers must understand that.
This reading was very informative on the avenues of educational reform. The comparison between communistic societies and democratic societies persuades me to think about, “Why isn’t our country looking at education in this aspect?” But this concern is easily answered. People in different societies have different beliefs and morals. However the author pulls out the fact that this book addresses issues of school reformation and reconstruction. These ideas are of greater concern to me since I would have to endure these changes. My real question is, “What do these changes consist of?” I loved how he concludes by stating the quote that “… man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" This is a statement that I agree with since it presents a sense of hope for school districts to rise to a plateau higher than we can imagine.
This article reviews the publication, Tinkering toward Utopia, in which the authors Tyack and Cuban talk about the school reform that has taken place over the past few years. The one thing that really stood out to me after reading the article is that when we are compared to the education in other countries, the data used is biased towards the other countries. It said that the United States used 75% percent of our student’s scores while other countries used the top percentiles of their students. You cannot fairly say that the United States is below these countries when we are not using the appropriate statistics. I guess as a future mathematics teacher that point of the article really ticked me off. As future teachers, we are all told about how bad the United States education system is and how important it is that we turn our schools around now. We are told how we do not want to fall behind other countries and so on. I would love to be the person that creates the tests and performs the correct statistical data to see what the right facts are about the international comparisons. I was also interested in the part where they said that larger schools tend to have students that feel alienated in their classrooms. I personally went to a very big high school and the class sizes never affected me at all. Wouldn’t that just be a matter of making sure that the student to faculty ratio is the same among all of the schools? Overall this article made me interested in reading the book Tinkering toward Utopia and maybe learning more about the school reform movement that our society is pushing so drastically.
Key Points: •People fail to see what it takes to maintain something along with neglecting the health and fortunes of the “tree” (the children) •Explains to build a better society by enriching the skills, learning, and viewpoints of its citizens •First issue: impact and future prospects of racial and cultural issues in U.S. society (within schools and classrooms) •Second issue: rapidly growing interest of school reformers in shifting their groups
In this reading, it talks about how students outside of the United States have a drive for school however the students who live in the US views tests as “another boring set of blacks to pencil in on answer sheets.” This shows how the lack of interest for students in the U.S affects their testing grades which is then blamed on society or even the school itself for not giving the “proper teaching” for the students to succeed. The reading then goes into talking about how back then larger schools seemed to be a good idea because they offered a larger variety and more of a “broader and deeper curriculum to meet the learning needs” however thirty years later, it is now stated that larger schools make the students more distant from the teachers and peers.
Change being the only constant can also be applied to the American school system which is always subject to reform in order to reach a point in which citizens can contribute to a “utopian” society as mentioned in the article. However, as suggested in the article, this ‘tinkering’ towards utopia may not be entirely negatively and there may not be a definite point for this utopia; instead it may just a process with no definite end. Some of the key points mentioned in this article include some of the concepts mentioned in the book such as “policy talk”, “policy action” and “implementation of change” which are all varying degrees of making concrete change in America’s education system. Lastly, the point of “decentralization, deregulation and choice as a cure to what is wrong in education” as stated by businessman, Pete DuPont undermines the speculation of what degree of reform the education system needs.
ReplyDeleteThis article helps me understand teaching and learning through inquiry because as future educators we need to question policies regarding school reform because they will actively affect our students and classrooms. Whether we are in favor of a top-down or bottom-up approaches to school reform, they will both trickle down to our classrooms. Which then compels us to ask what is happening in our school districts and how will it affect me and my students?
When first reading this article, I found it very convoluted and not very informational. It seemed as though the author of this summary was writing just to praise the authors of the book, Tinkering Toward Utopia, and only did a cursory view of what was discussed in the book. I don’t feel as if I truly understand what the book was about.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I do believe what I could pinpoint about the book was very insightful. It seemed to give a broad view of the United States educational system, past and present, and how ideas and theories have changed. For example, in the past, many businessmen, like Pierre DuPont, believed that centralization of schools would improve education immensely. Now, businessmen believe the exact opposite. I think it is interesting to see the growth and change in opinion over time. It shows that as a teacher, I will never stop learning. There will always be new material and teaching methods for me to absorb, as well as new experiences in the classroom with students every year, even every day. I also think it is important to pinpoint that the book discusses standardized testing, and how the United States stacks up internationally. This is a widely and repeatedly discussed topic today.
I think, if anything, this summary made me want to read the book to actually get a sense of what it is about; this may or may not have been the purpose of the summary, but either way, it worked.
Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform
ReplyDeleteWhat I found interesting about this article was when Tyack and Cuban talk about the United States competing internationally. Seventy-five percent of the U.S. student population was compared with the top nine percent of students in West Germany in math and science assessments. I see something wrong here! How is this possible? We not only were compared with West Germany, but with the top thirteen percent of the students in the Netherlands and the top forty-five percent of the students in Sweden. Then people wonder why we are so behind! I don’t think these comparisons help us in any way, I don’t even want to imagine how off the numbers would be.
Something that this article made me think about is the lives students live outside of school. What’s the real reason students are falling behind and failing? Is it because of the teachers? Or is it because they choose to not achieve anything in life? Is a reform really needed in the schools? I wish I had the answer to all of these questions. Sometimes I wonder if the younger generations are just becoming more corrupted and not willing to learn. Seems like school administrations and teachers are being blamed for the failure of students and for the lack of education in the entire country! Maybe researchers should look into the life of students and the effort they put into their education.
After reading the article there were 3 different parts the stuck out to me:
ReplyDelete1. “Professors Tyack and Cuban start with the proposition that Americans have long seen their
schools as a major agency for building a better society by enriching the skills, learning, and
viewpoints of its citizens. They then lead us from these utopian dreams to the realization that
perfecting schools has been, and continues to be, a slow game,…”
2. “Tyack and Cuban point out that international comparisons of student achievement are plagued by problems of non-equivalence among groups of students taking the exams.
3. “Many of the insights the authors identify about the roles of teachers, parents, and students come from a relatively new breed of education researchers, who spend time in schools and classrooms rather than seeking generalizations about schooling by interpreting national data streams — a useful addition to the analysis of schooling.”
Part one stuck out to me because I completely agree with the fact that many people view school as a place to start to build a better society. The following sentence then gives the actuality that this is an extremely slow process that many people have been trying to do.
Part two suck out to me because I have heard about this before. I understand this problem to be that the US is testing all of its children while other countries are only testing there top percentage of students and therefore producing betters grades. Why then is this not addressed when discussing that other countries are testing better then the US?
Part three stuck out to me because I did know that about educational researchers. In my Biochemistry class there is a graduate student who sits in and watches Dr. Parkin teach our class. Her study is based on Dr. Parkin’s use of Inquiry based activities (POGL) for us to learn the daunting material. As a student in his classroom I find the exercise to be extremely frustrating and difficult. I’m not sure why this is since I understood inquiry teaching to be a way of teaching.
After reading this article i realized i did not learn anything new. All that it points out is the obvious. Don't we all know that the system needs to be changed and that other nations perform better that Americans on tests and in general? Yes we know that America is racially diverse and we need to incorporate everyone in order to succeed.But talking about the authors and how great they are wont help us in this reform. I didn't like that the author of this article talks how Tyack's and Cuban's had this great ideas instead of the ideas themselves. Pointing out the strengths of the book, by the author, taught me that reforms are important and that as a teacher i will be actively searching how to improve educational system in general, as well as, search how to improve educational system in my classroom.
ReplyDeleteKey Points:
ReplyDeleteperfecting schools = “slow game”
international testing - not the most important reasons
contrasts in reform efforts
“large-scale frenetic adoption of quickly conceived proposals, some old and some new, has become the mainstream of current school reform”
Teachers role in reform
This article helps me to better understand teaching and learning through inquiry because not only do we need to use inquiry with our students but with ourselves. There is a need for teachers to be curious about what is happening around them and to ask questions and be involved. For any reform to occur it must be implemented through the teachers and we as a teachers must understand that.
This reading was very informative on the avenues of educational reform. The comparison between communistic societies and democratic societies persuades me to think about, “Why isn’t our country looking at education in this aspect?” But this concern is easily answered. People in different societies have different beliefs and morals. However the author pulls out the fact that this book addresses issues of school reformation and reconstruction. These ideas are of greater concern to me since I would have to endure these changes. My real question is, “What do these changes consist of?” I loved how he concludes by stating the quote that “… man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" This is a statement that I agree with since it presents a sense of hope for school districts to rise to a plateau higher than we can imagine.
ReplyDeleteTinkering toward Utopia Reflection
ReplyDeleteThis article reviews the publication, Tinkering toward Utopia, in which the authors Tyack and Cuban talk about the school reform that has taken place over the past few years. The one thing that really stood out to me after reading the article is that when we are compared to the education in other countries, the data used is biased towards the other countries. It said that the United States used 75% percent of our student’s scores while other countries used the top percentiles of their students. You cannot fairly say that the United States is below these countries when we are not using the appropriate statistics. I guess as a future mathematics teacher that point of the article really ticked me off. As future teachers, we are all told about how bad the United States education system is and how important it is that we turn our schools around now. We are told how we do not want to fall behind other countries and so on. I would love to be the person that creates the tests and performs the correct statistical data to see what the right facts are about the international comparisons.
I was also interested in the part where they said that larger schools tend to have students that feel alienated in their classrooms. I personally went to a very big high school and the class sizes never affected me at all. Wouldn’t that just be a matter of making sure that the student to faculty ratio is the same among all of the schools? Overall this article made me interested in reading the book Tinkering toward Utopia and maybe learning more about the school reform movement that our society is pushing so drastically.
Key Points:
ReplyDelete•People fail to see what it takes to maintain something along with neglecting the health and fortunes of the “tree” (the children)
•Explains to build a better society by enriching the skills, learning, and viewpoints of its citizens
•First issue: impact and future prospects of racial and cultural issues in U.S. society (within schools and classrooms)
•Second issue: rapidly growing interest of school reformers in shifting their groups
In this reading, it talks about how students outside of the United States have a drive for school however the students who live in the US views tests as “another boring set of blacks to pencil in on answer sheets.” This shows how the lack of interest for students in the U.S affects their testing grades which is then blamed on society or even the school itself for not giving the “proper teaching” for the students to succeed. The reading then goes into talking about how back then larger schools seemed to be a good idea because they offered a larger variety and more of a “broader and deeper curriculum to meet the learning needs” however thirty years later, it is now stated that larger schools make the students more distant from the teachers and peers.