The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling

by Jal Mehta

Overview

Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make the states set high standards, measure student progress, and hold failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach to school reform that Americans have tried before.

In The Allure of Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this elusive goal. Not once, not twice, but three separate times-in the Progressive Era, the 1960s and '70s, and NCLB-reformers have hit upon the same idea for remaking schools. Over and over again, outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific management and have attempted to apply principles of rational administration from above. Each of these movements started with high hopes and ambitious promises, but each gradually discovered that schooling is not easy to "order" from afar: policymakers are too far from schools to know what they need; teachers are resistant to top-down mandates; and the practice of good teaching is too complex for simple external standardization.

The larger problem, Mehta argues, is that reformers have it backwards: they are trying to do on the back-end, through external accountability, what they should have done on the front-end: build a strong, skilled and expert profession. Our current pattern is to draw less than our most talented people into teaching, equip them with little relevant knowledge, train them minimally, put them in a weak welfare state, and then hold them accountable when they predictably do not achieve what we seek. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach which characterizes top-performing educational nations: attract strong candidates into teaching, develop relevant and usable knowledge, train teachers extensively in that knowledge, and support these efforts through a strong welfare state.

The Allure of Order boldly challenges conventional wisdom with a sweeping, empirically rich account of the last century of education reform, and offers a new path forward for the century to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199942060
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	04/30/2013
Series:	Studies in Postwar American Political Development Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Jal Mehta is Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research explores the underlying structures which shape American schooling, the cultural assumptions which underpin these approaches to education, and the consequences of those decisions for schools, teachers, and students. He is the co-editor of The Futures of School Reform. Mehta received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: The Allure of Order: Rationalizing Schools From the Progressive to the Present

Chapter Two: The Cultural Struggle for Control Over Schooling: The Power of Ideas and the Weakness of the Educational Field

Chapter Three: Taking Control from Above: The Rationalization of Schooling in the Progressive Era

Chapter Four: The Forgotten Standards Movement: The Coleman Report, the Defense Department, and a Nascent Push for Educational Accountability

Chapter Five: Setting the Problem: The Deep Roots and Long Shadows of A Nation at Risk

Chapter Six: A Semi-Profession in an Era of Accountability

Chapter Seven: E Pluribus Unum: How Standards and Accountability Became King

Chapter Eight: Transforming Federal Policy: Ideas and the Triumph of Accountability Politics

Chapter Nine: Rationalizing Schools: Patterns, Ironies, Contradictions

Chapter Ten: Beyond Rationalization: Inverting the Pyramid, Remaking the Educational Sector

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Regimentation—of students, and especially teachers—is the ill-conceived fourth “R” of education policy, according to this probing study of American public school reform. Harvard education professor Mehta describes three movements towards the “rationalization” of education: the Progressive-era shift from one-room schoolhouses to centralized districts of factory-style schools where teachers toiled under scientific administrators; Vietnam-era applications of the Pentagon’s “systems analysis” techniques to education; and the recent drive for top-down accountability embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act. He sees recurring patterns in these episodes: warnings of crisis; calls to rein in out-of-control schools with principles of efficiency and external control; a fixation on testing and standards; and unsuccessful resistance by educators whose “humanist” objections are seen as self-serving. Mehta situates fine-grained accounts of politics and legislation within elaborate sociological theorizing, partly cribbed from Pierre Bourdieu, that emphasizes the role of ideas and paradigms in motivating policy. He focuses on the status of teachers and puts the professionalization of teaching, along the lines of law and medicine, at the heart of his own reform agenda. There’s not much here about the pedagogical substance of reform initiatives, but Mehta’s sophisticated, but very readable analysis illuminates the ideological wranglings that shape them. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"The success of The Allure of Order is how it challenges anyone involved in education reform to reexamine their most closely held concepts. At this critical period when the only consensus among U.S. educators, reformers, and policymakers is the need for change, The Allure of Order is a major guide for the sweeping decisions that must be made during the next several years. While analyzing both the history and the common strands of education reform movements, Jal Mehta also puts forward meaningful proposals to avoid repeating the past while building a system that truly empowers educators to perform at their highest levels. Documenting that the current 'rationalization of schools' has reached its limits, Dr. Mehta points us to an approach that produces greater learning outcomes by trusting educators, sharing ideas, and moving away from the concept of 'one best system." —Robert Wise, President, Alliance for Excellent Education

"In this detailed historical and political reanalysis of America's checkered history of school reform, Jal Mehta finds two major patterns: an impulse on the part of reformers and policymakers for the imposition of order and coherence on a set of institutions that lack the incentives and capacities to respond to these ideas, and a persistent lack of attention to the underlying problems of human values, knowledge, and skill that actually determine the value of schooling to individuals and society over time. His analysis leads to a vision of the future that will be harder to achieve but more likely to succeed, based on valuing human knowledge and skill over technical order in the learning sector." —Richard F. Elmore, Gregory Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership, Harvard Graduate School of Education

"A powerful academic treatise written lucidly which, being pleasingly free of jargon, deserves, nay demands, a wide readership...." —London School of Economics

"Highly recommended." —CHOICE

"Jal Mehta challenges our tendency to believe that every education reform effort is 'new' and therefore holds fresh promise for improving student performance... Although the value of standards as a primary driver of educational improvement has generated a plethora of literature, Mehta's search for why this reform has persisted, despite frustration with student achievement gains, adds depth to an ongoing and urgent policy discussion about strategies to improve student performance." —Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

From the Publisher

Mehta (education, Harvard Univ.; The Futures of School Reform) begins with a description of the Progressive Era, when decision-making shifted from teachers to administrators, and the focus was on accountability and outcomes. A similar notion in the late 1960s and early 1970s additionally sought to combine education equality with fiscal conservatism. The No Child Left Behind Act, a federal policy derived from the state standards movement of the 1980s and 1990s was acclaimed as a radical departure in school reform and is now denounced by both reform parties. Mehta argues that the American education system was organized as a bureaucratic hierarchy, not as an honest profession. He believes that with better training, teachers and schools would flourish and envisions a world in which teachers are in control of their schools. VERDICT The appeal of Mehta's work leans toward the professional rather than the casual reader; educators will likely agree with the author.—Terry Christner, Hutchinson P.L., KS

Library Journal