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"What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children--but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way 'this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.' Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult. At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes--to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own. Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much"--Publisher description

Education reformers have zeroed in on a measure known as the value-added approach. According to this method, you calculate the effectiveness of individual teachers by the increase in test scores that students demonstrate after a year in their classroom. In this article, I explore three major questions that arise from the increased prominence of value-added metrics in the education reform movement. Why did the value-added measure of teaching emerge at this point in the history of American education? What are the core characteristics of teaching as a professional practice that make it so hard to perform effectively and so hard to measure accurately? And under these circumstances, what are the likely consequences of using the value-added measure of teaching?

The mantra of the current school reform in the US is that high-quality teachers produce high-achieving students. As a result, the educational system should hold teachers accountable for student outcomes, offering bonus pay to the most effective teachers and shoving the least effective ones out the door. In order to implement such a policy, a valid and reliable measure of teacher quality, and the reformers have zeroed in on one such measure, which is known as the value-added approach. This article explores three major questions that arise from this development: 1) why did the value-added measure of teaching emerge at this point in the history of American education?; 2) What are the core characteristics of teaching as a professional practice that make it so hard to perform effectively and so hard to measure accurately?; and 3) And under these circumstances, what are the likely consequences of using the value-added measure of teaching? Adapted from the source document.

This book is a comparative history that explores the social, cultural, and political formation of the modern nation through the construction of public schooling. It asks how modern school systems arose in a variety of different republics and non-republics across four continents during the period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The authors begin with the republican preoccupation with civic virtue - the need to overcome self-interest in order to take up the common interest - which requires a form of education that can produce individuals who are capable of self-guided rational action for the public good. They then ask how these educational preoccupations led to the emergence of modern school systems in a disparate array of national contexts, even those that were not republican.

During the past decade "accountability" has emerged as the master rationale for education reform. Given its ubiquity and central role in current policy and practice, it is almost possible to forget that even 15 years ago the term was hardly ever used and accountability, in today's sense, was virtually a nonissue. That is surprising given the certainty with which advocates claim accountability as the needle's eye through which the camel of public education reform must pass. How has this change come to pass? How has accountability emerged as the master rationale for contemporary education reform? How has it become the accepted justification for policies from the construction of centralized curricula, to teacher evaluation schemes based on student test scores, to government takeovers of schools that "fail to improve"?