Reconstructing the Common Good in Education

Larry Cuban is Professor of Education at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change Without Reform in University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research. Dorothy Shipps is Assistant Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

• Foreword Patricia Albjerg Graham; Introduction Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps; Part I. Ways of Seeing the Common Good in Public Education: The Past Informing the Present: 1. Public schools and the elusive search for the common good William J. Reese; 2. Turning points: reconstruction and the growth of national influence in education Ted Mitchell; 3. 'The is no escape ... from the ogre of indoctrination': George Counts and the civic dilemmas of democratic educators Daniel Perlstein; 4. 'No one here to put us down': hispano education in a Southern Colorado community, 1920-1963 Ruben Donato; 5. Echoes of corporate influence: managing away urban school troubles Dorothy Shipps; Part II. Ways of Seeing the Common Good in Public Education: Social and Political Implications: 6. No exit: public education as an inescapably public good David F. Labaree; 7. Bureaucracy left and right: thinking about the one best system Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe; 8. Why is it so hard to get 'good' schools? Larry Cuban; Part III. Uncommon Ways of Seeing the Common Good: 9. Civic friendship: an aristotelian perspective Elisabeth Hansot; 10. Devotion and ambiguity in the struggles of a poor mother and her family: New York City, 1918-1919 Michael B. Katz; 11. Reflections on education as transcendence John Mayer; Afterword Dorothy Shipps and Larry Cuban; Notes; References; Index.

"Every library with serious contemporary affairs or education collections will want this intelligent book."—C. A. Cunningham, University of Chicago ". . . . This book does something that is unique in our headlong rush to change, reform, punish, or criticize education. Its thoughtful essays pause and reflect on what public education means in America. . . . [Reconstructing the Common Good in Education] is relevant for both historians and those in education policy. . . .[It] provides useful ideas and material for both."—American Studies International