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 |
"Turning Schools into Profit Centers"Watch out when the business community starts calling the shots on school reform. Before you can say “accountability,” they’re yakking about how the dowdy world of education ought to be handed over to the slick MBA’s and run like a corporation, allowing self-interested individuals and unfettered competition to transform the neighborhood school into a pseudo-profit center. Now comes the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the giant supermarket chain, which says it will hand out “cash awards” to schools in Idaho based on standardized test results. In this essay in the Jan. 8, 2003, edition of Education Week, I pick apart the folly of these schemes that, in essence, bribe schools for better test scores. What are the educational consequences of such tactics? Who wins and who loses? |
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