Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform

Great first book for a lesson on educational reform in the U.S. The authors deliver the facts without bias and judgment. Although this book is 15 years old, its use and application to today's education reform discussion is essential. Very deserving of the award they received for the book.

Having read Tinkering Toward Utopia for one of my graduate classes in administration at the GSE at Rutgers, I would summarize that the book is excellent, but a little bit dated. Tyack & Cuban present a well-done overview of the American educational system, from its beginnings in the early 20th century through the mid-1980's. Their theme, "tinkering toward utopia," is an interesting take on addressing school reform throughout the century and sheds light on the problems and pitfalls of "overpromising" and "hyperbole" that have existed--and continue to exist--in American education. Overall, the text is easy to read and is replete with well-developed examples. My only caution is that although the ideas presented continue through and are valied in modern times, the examples and data contained in the work are, for lack of a better word, dated--11 years in public education, especially with 5+ of those years overshadowed by NCLB, is a long time of increased levels of accountability that are missing in what could be "a century (and a little more) of public school reform." One would hope that a revised edition be published in the near future with a chapter or two specifically devoted to those last 5 years of the 20th century and the transition into the 21st. However, overall, the text is excellent and highly informative.

The history of public school reform in the United States has been characterized by institutional inertia and myriad failed attempts at wholesale change. Although policy elites, educators, school pundits, and the lay public regularly disagree about why we have intractable schools, David Tyack and Larry Cuban, in Tinkering toward Utopia, argue that a careful and complete understanding of schools as institutions has long eluded those who attempt to effect change in schools. The authors also claim that incremental change in education is a natural and viable phenomenon, not a symbol of a failed system. By rendering these arguments through sociopolitical and historical lenses, they present a comprehensive take on the stagnancy of school reform. Although the word tinkering can connote clumsiness or incompetence, the authors use it in an equivocal sense in order to argue that educational change for better or worse has been piecemeal, largely due to what they call the grammar of schooling. Radical reforms, such as merit-based teacher pay and open classrooms, have repeatedly failed to make a lasting impression on schools largely because they have attempted to alter the structural and behavioral regularities that are entrenched in the notion of what constitutes a "real school." The argument, although effective, is nothing new: Sarason's (1971) illustrative example of the "man from outer space" immediately comes to mind. However, Tyack and Cuban take this argument to another level by diagnosing many failed reform efforts as "too intramural" (p. 108), and incongruent with external forces (e.g., college admission requirements, labor market needs). How the grammar of schooling was engendered and why it has remained seemingly immutable is the real thrust of the problem. Like good scholars, Tyack and Cuban do not ignore political dimensions. They soundly argue that despite the ostensible claim that centralized governance of schools by experts would forever "take the schools out of politics," technocratic control of schools actually had just the opposite effect in practice, for the act of devolving power to a single group has the word politics written all over it. Furthermore, the structural regularities that exist today (e.g., age-graded schools, egg-crate classrooms, departmentalized high schools) secured their places in the schooling schema long ago by first gaining the necessary political support, and then by demonstrating that they were efficient and easily replicable. Crystallized school traditions have essentially become the blinders that prevent the universe of alternatives to be considered. Tyack and Cuban clearly expose their advocacy of the classroom teacher as a critical change agent. Their argument is lucid and point-blank: schools change reforms. "Once the schoolroom door was shut, most teachers retained considerable autonomy to instruct the children as they saw fit" (p. 115). Unsurprisingly, thwarted attempts to introdu

If you are looking for a general history of American public education, look elsewhere. However, if you are interested in an examination of *why* American education is the way it is, then this book is for you. Tyack and Cuban delve into questions that should concern anyone with an interest in educational reform, such as: What has driven our desire to change education? Why do some reforms work while others don't? Their examination of these questions alone is worth the read, and their style (concise and clear) makes the reading itself a pleasure.

Tinkering Toward Utopia is simply the best brief introduction to the history of educational reform in the US available. Anyone with a genuine interest in historical explanations of why grand schemes of school reform fail and why "crisis" is the way the US has tended to view its need for school reform, will be rewarded by this clearly written account. The book substitutes complex historical analysis for the usual simple-minded polemics of writing on education, but the authors do not weigh the book down with a lot of historical evidence and inpenetrable footnotes. I highly recommend this book for anyone who cares about the prospects of reforming public schools in the US.