This essay reviews six competing positions on U.S. school reform: a speech from Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System"; Frederick Hess's "The Same Thing Over and Over"; Charles Payne's "So Much Reform, So Little Change"; Anthony Byrk and others' "Organizing School for…

Explores reactions among advocates of five distinct political ideologies (conservative, neoconservative, neoliberal, liberal, and radical democratic) to marginalized groups' struggles over the past 50 years for recognition, with specific attention directed toward how these reactions offer different futures in and outside American schools. (RS)

Supports predictions concerning two consequences of combining merit pay and other business practices within a reading program: (1) that school personnel would constrict their definitions of reading and reading instruction to those prescribed by district policy and that (2) teachers would consider reading instruction less fulfilling than they did…

Proposes a model of rationalization, reification, and alienation to explain teachers' reliance on commercial materials during their reading instruction. (AEA)

Questions the results of an earlier study that found that accommodating instructional style to disadvantaged students' interaction patterns increases the students' achievement-related behavior. (AEA)

Attempts to clarify the social concepts and reality of rationalization and deskilling as they apply to the teaching of reading in U.S. elementary schools and how the teaching of reading connects with the social structure and students' and teachers' lives in and beyond the classroom. (RS)