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 Improvement"; and Valerie Kinloch's "Harlem On Our Minds." Read separately, each invites readers to join a social consensus in order to become competent citizens eager to redesign American schools to realize a desired future. Read together, they provide a primer on how our sociological imaginations might help us to recognize the value of dissensus in school reform within a pluralistic democracy.