This timely and important book is both critical and constructive. As educational policy becomes one of our major political backgrounds and the connection between politics and policy is both underscored and criticized, Mary Lee Smith and her associates take their criticism one decisive step further, examining the transitive relation between politics and actual classroom practice. They show that educational policy serves as political propaganda directed at an electorate desperate for change. They refocus current educational debates, casting them in their true partisan light while demonstrating...

This timely and important book is both critical and constructive. As educational policy becomes one of our major political backgrounds and the connection between politics and policy is both underscored and criticized, Mary Lee Smith and her associates take their criticism one decisive step further, examining the transitive relation between politics and actual classroom practice. They show that educational policy serves as political propaganda directed at an electorate desperate for change. They refocus current educational debates, casting them in their true partisan light while demonstrating...