ERIC Number: EJ763312
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006
Pages: 6
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1539-9664
EISSN: N/A
Things Are Falling Apart: Can the Center Find a Solution that Will Hold?
Finn, Chester E., Jr.
Education Next, v6 n1 p27-32 Win 2006
The year 2005 began with high schools taking center stage in Washington's continuing drama concerning education reform. President George W. Bush started things off in January, when he delivered a ringing address at a suburban District of Columbia high school about the urgency of reforming American high schools and offered a bold $1.5 billion plan for doing so. A month after the presidential call to arms for high-school reform, 45 governors and a host of education leaders and CEOs met in a downtown Washington, D.C. hotel for a summit devoted to the subject. With all these powerful people talking high-school reform, it seemed that the planets had aligned to make high schools, the lost child of public education, the featured attraction on the U.S. education-policy agenda. But things began to fall apart. As nearly everyone in education knows, something is wrong with U.S. high schools. But as we attempt to determine just what it is, the picture loses focus. In this article, the author identifies at least six versions of the problem, each giving rise to different theories of action and strategies for solving it. It can be concluded that the high-school problem is actually a tangle of problems in need of a multipart solution. (Contains 2 figures.)
Descriptors: Presidents, Educational Change, Public Education, High Schools, Educational Improvement, Educational Finance, Financial Support, Change Strategies, Politics of Education, Low Achievement, Relevance (Education), Adolescents
Hoover Institution. Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6010. Tel: 800-935-2882; Fax: 650-723-8626; e-mail: educationnext@hoover.stanford.edu; Web site: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: High Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: District of Columbia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A