kitchen table math, the sequel: assigned reading at schools of education

Saturday, February 24, 2007

assigned reading at schools of education

In the domain of foundations of education, the books most often required by the programs we reviewed were authored by Anita Woolfolk, Jonathan Kozol, Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Joel Spring, Howard Gardner, and John Dewey. Woolfolk’s work is a textbook in educational psychology, and one of Joel Spring’s volumes is a textbook in educational foundations. The rest are well-known works that embrace a constructivist and/or progressive standpoint. Conspicuously absent from almost all such syllabi were works that took a very different approach to teaching, such as those by E. D. Hirsch or Diane Ravitch. (We found Hirsch on two syllabi, Ravitch on just one.) Equality of education is a central theme of these courses, as evident from the included authors. Nonetheless, not one of the foundations courses, in the 15 schools of education for which we had complete data sets for that domain, asked students to read The Black-White Test Score Gap, at the time of our review arguably the leading collection of scholarly writings on that subject. We also noted that eight of the programs of teacher certification we reviewed did not cover either the philosophy or the history of education among the courses required for certification.

source:
Skewed Perspective
David Steiner
Education Next

I'm feeling ornery today.

Then again, I always feel ornery.

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