Peter Sacks
Books and Essays by Peter SacksBooks
Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (Look for it in May 2007 from the University of California Press)
While we often hear about the growing economic divide between the rich and the poor in America, Tearing Down the Gates locates the fountainhead of these growing economic disparities, our education system, and shows how the widening class divide results in an untold loss of human talent that will derail the American Dream --not just for some, but for us all. Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change it (Perseus Publishing)
A critical examination of America's 'testing culture' in schools, higher education, and the workplace, and how the American meritocracy can be more fair for all citizens. Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America (Open Court).
An inquiry into "postmodern" American culture and its sometimes corrosive effects on qualilty in higher education. Essays and Commentary
How Colleges Perpetuate Inequality
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 12, 2007 "The Geography of Privilege"
Essay in the Spring, 2004, issue of Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice Class Rules: the Fiction of Egalitarian Higher Education
From the Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education, July 25, 2003. "Class Struggle"
Review essay in The Nation, May 5, 2003. "The GRE and Me: Prestige Versus Quality in American Higher Education"
Essay appears in the Spring 2003 issue of Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice "Turning Schools into Profit Centers"
From the Jan. 8, 2003, issue of Education Week "A Nation at Risk"
Review essay of In Schools We Trust by Deborah Meier in The Nation, Nov. 18, 2002. "On Changing the SAT: A Contrarian's View of Our 'Culture of Standardized Testing.'
Education Week, June 5, 2002. "Testing Times in Higher Ed"
A review essay on the book, Fair Game?, by Rebecca Zwick for The Nation. "Pseudo-meritocracy"
The Boston Review, December/January 2001 "How Admissions Tests Hinder Access to Graduate and Professional Schools."
The Chronicle of Higher Education (Chronicle Review), June 8, 2001. "Predictable Losers in Testing Schemes"
The School Administrator, Dec. 2000 |
"A Nation at Risk"From Peter Sacks's review essay, "A Nation at Risk," in the Nov. 18 issue of The Nation: "Schools that fail to meet annual growth targets for test scores are embroidered with a Scarlet A, branding them a failing school. Parents of children 'trapped in failing schools,' as the Bush team has described it, are invited to transfer their children to supposedly better schools-in other words, the ones with better test scores. The entire scheme is erected upon a pie-in-the-sky proposition: that turning public education into a pseudo-marketplace in which schools compete on the basis of test scores for their "customers," i.e. parents and their children, will not only improve educational quality across the board but also wipe out the thorny achievement gaps between races and classes. The only catch to this seemingly elegant, market-driven solution to education reform is that there's virtually no evidence that it works. Indeed, after nearly two decades of such "reforms" at the state level following the 1983 diatribe against America's schools known as "A Nation at Risk," the evidence is overwhelming that the Bush approachis, at best, counterproductive to the aims of education, and at worst a cynical ploy to privatize the nation's public schools. Whether the explanation is unabashed greed or merely certain habits of mind in a capitalistic society governed by the professional classes, American policymakers, while tone deaf to the unfolding educational fiasco they are wreaking, have been mesmerized by regulatory models and corporate-inspired quick fixes that presume school improvement is limited only by the degree to which you can bribe people or punish people on the basis of their performance on standardized tests." |
|
