Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform » (1st Edition)

David Tyack is Vida Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University.

Larry Cuban is Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University and past president of the American Educational Research Association.

For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices.

In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to "reinvent" schooling?

Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.

Penny Bender Sebring - Social Service Review

Although aimed primarily at educators, this book also has enormous value for social service professionals and scholars. With the current emphasis on building communities and linking social agencies with schools, understanding school reform is vital...The spate of recent books and articles on school reform has contributed a confusing array of approaches and arguments. Through its historical analysis, this book helps to disentangle some of this confusion and offers critical lessons of history...[This] is a small book with large thoughts. For social service professionals and scholars, it is a quick but profound study in public school reform. It suggests they will be most successful if their projects help teachers solve concrete problems in teaching students...For educators, citizens, and policy makers who toil every day to push the rock of Sisyphus up the hill of change, this little tome offers some real treasures in historical perspective, argument, and realistic expectations.