Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education

ISBN-13: 9780415962735 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 242 str.

Peter Taubman

Opis

Over the last decade the transformation in the field of education that is occurring under the twin banners of "standards" and "accountability" has materially affected every aspect of schooling, teaching, and teacher education in the United States. The terms in which teaching and teacher education are now discussed emanate from neo-liberal economic policies, corporate business practices, neo-conservative social agendas, and cognitive and behavioral psychology. The fact that leading educational organizations have embraced this current transformation suggests how even progressive impulses and aspirations have been appropriated, re-formed, and aligned with educational policies and practices that were once seen as inimical to those very impulses and aspirations. This book offers interdisciplinary ways to understand the educational reforms underway in urban education, teaching, and teacher education, and their impact on what it means to teach. Furthermore it offers an alternative vision of teacher education.

Outstanding features. This book is distinguished in four ways from others that have addressed aspects of the transformation occurring in education. It

• maps the totality of the transformation and takes into account the constellation of forces shaping that transformation;
• explicitly addresses the concerns of educators and parents who have embraced the various reform efforts that constitute the transformation;
• brings to bear a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective and a Foucauldian genealogical perspective, both of which have generally been absent from the attempts to understand the transformation in the fields of teaching and teacher education; and
• offers specific proposals for what an alternative teacher education program would look like and argues why such a program would better address the concerns of well-intentioned educators who have surrendered to various reforms efforts.

Recenzje

"...I wholly appreciate Taubman's efforts to critique the climate of blame and defamation in defense of teachers. Peter Taubman is fervent in his language, thorough in his literature review, and provocative in his arguments."--Education Review, April 2010