The+One+Best+System+Epilogue


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The One Best System: Epilogue**

In the Epilogue of __The One Best System__ by David B. Tyack the author discusses the progress of the one best system over the year, its pros and cons, as well as its sufficiently in adapting to the rapidly changing times. Tyack talks about how the educational system was increasing as a capital investment, and the amount of people attending schools increased as well. Although this is a great improvement, during the 1960s the system of education encountered a crisis. As the amount of children attending school increased, (due to the rising birthrate of their generation from WWII), there was a greater demand for school funding, teachers, and more schools. Also, some believed that the system of education was not sufficient enough for the rapidly changing world. The system of education at this time was also believed to favor only those socially and economically eligible—which caused great inequality for minorities and others who could not afford education. Newton Edwards describes this when he stated in 1939 that:
 * Summary:**

“…//it is obvious that education becomes an instrument of social stratification and of regional and racial inequality.//” Inequality became a rising problem as urban migration patterns increased and more African Americans entered the public school system.

As the epilogue continues a debate unfolds, showing what are believed to be some pro’s and cons to segregation within schools. Tyack then sought an explanation to the theory that poverty was directly linked to the low test scores seen throughout these segregated schools. Psychologists argued that poor children failed in school because they lacked experience from their home and their community that they needed to succeed. A fight for desegregation began but it was greatly opposed by the white people because in certain cities after mixing the schools the ratios would still not be even close to equal. Also they felt that poorly run schools led kids to unemployment or the worst jobs available.

In the 1960’s the American Federation of Teachers was formed to advocate for more opportunity and funding for those who can’t afford schooling. They also fought for increased pay for the teachers and more power over educational policies. In September 1967 teachers went out on union strikes in such cities as Detroit and New York hoping to gain the rights they thought they deserved. This Epilogue guides us through time from the 1950’s when teachers had little influence, into the 1970’s when great change finally occurred and schooling finally began to shape in its appropriate form regardless of race or income essentially to achieve the goal of creating “the one best system”. Powerful alignments formed between teacher’s school boards and superintendents to centralize control. Educators finally began realizing that they need to share power over educational decision-making and people started realizing that education is a full time commitment and if you want to be an educator you have to give it your all for the students and for yourself.


 * Key Passages:**


 * p. 270 -** "Was American schooling too soft, too ineficient, too unselective to sustain the nation in its conflict with Russia? ... By the 1960's, however, schooling had become one of the prime weapons in the war on poverty and a central concern not only of policy-makers but also of the dispossessed, especially the people of color struggling for a greater share of power in cities. When muckrakers and sober scientists made it increasingly clear that the educational establishment was not fulfilling newly raised expectations, anger and disillusionment erupted, optimism gave way to doubt or despair, and many Americans came to question both the ideology and the institutions of public education. A new crisis was at hand, promising the be more serious and long-lasting than the previous ones."


 * p. 273 -** "Researchers documented that educational attainment and credentials were becoming increasingly important in employment and found shocking differentials in educational finance. in 1940 an investigator asked employers in eighteen industries what was the minimum education they required of the persons they hired. He found that entrance into white-collar occupations depended heavily upon the degree of schooling. While employers required only minimal schooling for workers in unskilled, semiskilled, service, and skilled jobs, they demanded high school graduation for a majority of persons hired as managers and as clerical and sales workers; a majority of those hired as professionals or semiprofessionals needed a college degree. Yet in 1940 2,000,000 children aged six to fifteen were not in any school, and by mid-decade probably half of the most talented students dropped out of school before they had "the kind and amount of schooling which would be justified by both their ability and the demands of our way of life." ... Normally the poorest states and communities were making the greatest proportional sacrifice. Most exploited were the black schools of the states which maintained segregated systems. There the median expense for white classrooms was $1,166, for Negro $477."


 * p. 274 -** "For six months Fine traveled all over the United States, talking with educators and legislators, viiting classes in big citites and mountain hollows. His conlusion: the public school system was near breakdown. Teachers were deserting the profession because of low pay and miserable moral; classes were overcrowded and double sessions were multiplying; parents were losing confidence in the public schools and sending their children to private schools instead; because of moratoria on building during the Depression and the war many communitites had ancient, disintegrating, school facilities (in New York alone there were 200 schoolhouses over fifty years old)."


 * p. 279 -** "Many of the white-collar jobs required higher standards in basic skills of reading, writing, and computation than did the older entry jobs in industry, posing a sharper challenge to the school system than it faced when the general educational attainment of the population was lower and occupational demads for academic competence were less rigorous"


 * p. 281-282 -** "Psychologists and educators argued that the reason poor children often failed in school was that they lacked certain experiences in the home and community that enabled others to succeed - in short, that they had a "cultural deficit." In 1964 and assistant superintendent in Boston explained what such deprivation meant: "Many of these children have low aspirational levels. ... By virtue of their limited background [they] fail to meet the expected outcomes as defined in Curriculum Guides. ... It is our hope to raise the achievement of these pupils closer to their potentials which have for too long been submerged by parental lack of values." The chairman of the Boston school board put the matter more succinctly: "We do not have inferior schools; we have been getting an inferior type of student." The problem lay in the child, not in the educational or social system."


 * p. 284 -** "This new public awareness of the failings and the significance of education has created a strong tension between the traditional ideal and the perceived actuatlity of rban education, especially among the "culturally different." ... many members of outcast groups demanded community control by their own people in place of the traditional corporate modle of governance which sought to rise above "intrest groups" ... to many blacks the school were not "above politics" but part of the struggle for black power."


 * p. 289 -** "In educational reform the decade of the 1960's has produced optimistic promises, raised expectations, bold experiments, some successes - and despair, failure, distrust, and neglect (both benign and otherwise). New strategies have popped up with astonishing speed: integration, compensation, community control, performance contracting, vouchers, alternative schools, deschooling - and the list goes on. Some of these innovations the reader will recognize as old wine in the new bottles; others are comparatively novel. In short, the reform scene today is a kaleidoscopic confusion of contending interests, of different assessments of need, of rhetorical panaceas and jarring hopelessness."


 * p. 291 -** "To succeed in improving the schooling of the dispossessed, educators are increasingly realizing that they need to share power over educational decision-making with representatives of urban communities they serve, that they need to find ways to teach that match the learning styles of the many ethnic groups, that they need to develop many alternatives within the system and to correct the many dysfunctions of the vast bureaucracies created by the administrative progressives. Old reforms need to be reformed anew, for today many lack confidence in the familiar patterns of power and authority that developed at the turn of the century. Substantial segments of this society no longer believe in centralism as an effective response to human needs, no longer trust an enlightened paternalism of elites and experts, no longer accept the inevitability or justice of the distribution of power and walth along existing class and racial lines. To create urban schools which really teach students, which reflect the pluralism of the society, which serve the quest for social justice - this is a task which will take persistent imagination, wisdom, and will."


 * Important Terminology:

"crises" (p. 269, 270) -** a common word in the schools during the 1940's through the 1970's and used to describe the 1940's and '50's. This denoted different problems in different decades. In the 1940's observers worried most about the critical shortage of funds and wondered how the cities could ever higher enough teachers and build enough schools to educate all the children born during the war. The 1950's brought up the question of whether American schooling was too soft, too inefficient, too unselective to sustain the nation in its conflict with Russia. In the 1960's muckrakers and sober scientists made it clear that the educational establishment was not fulfilling newly raised expectations. Americans began to question the ideology and the institutions of public education.
 * //Unfinished Business in American Education// (p. 273) -** a pamphlet that was created by the NEA and the American Council on Education that publicized the inequities of public schools.
 * McCarthyism (p. 275) -** under this influence many liberal and radical teachers were fired or silenced; ideological conformity became intense for students as well.
 * //Brown desegregation/Brown case (p. 279) -//** this gave hope to the American Negroes for educational justices, however this went against the common school ideology, but people wanted students to learn in an environment that they would grow up in, meaning that it wasn't an all white neighborhood, so it shouldn't be an all white school. The brown case, which took place in 1954, was when the supreme court ruled that the seperate schools for blacks and whites were not equal in educational opportunities and the racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Protection Clause of the fourteenth amendment, this paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.
 * //Racial Isolation in the Public Schools (p. 283)//** - cities and states released figures on the achievement level of different districts. This showed that despite efforts at compensatory education, the children of the poor and depressed minority groups tended to fall further behind in academic achievement each year.


 * Discussion Guiding Questions:**