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TINKERING TOWARD UTOPIA: A CENTURY OF PUBLIC SCHOOL REFORM by David Tyack and Larry Cuban.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 184 pp. $22.50.
We Americans frequently declare that authors dealing with complex issues and institutions are so narrowly focused on the trees that they fail to see and explain the forest and the forces that maintain it. Sometimes we assert the opposite - we criticize undue attention to the forest and neglect of the health and fortunes of each tree. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, professors of education at Stanford University, have managed to steer clear of both of these sins in Tinkering Toward Utopia, their brief and masterful overview of one hundred years of school reform in the United States.
No one has done it better! Tyack and Cuban fully deserve their 1995 Harvard University Press annual award for an outstanding publication about education and society, and their thoughtful perspectives on a century of reform efforts to improve U.S. schools would almost certainly have delighted the late Lawrence Cremin, the "dean" of educational historians in the United States. Professors Tyack and Cuban start with the proposition that Americans have long seen their schools as a major agency for building a better society by enriching the skills, learning, and viewpoints of its citizens. They then lead us from these utopian dreams to the realization that perfecting schools has been, and continues to be, a slow game, and the well-chosen title for this short but incisive book, Tinkering Toward Utopia, is a happy and almost poetic summary of the book's message: that today's so-called "school reform movement" has had numerous predecessors whose proud and confident announcements of their prescriptions for millennial achievements didn't work out, or did so only partly.
The authors, however, carefully avoid the irresponsible, negative rhetoric that has dominated judgments about U.S. schools since the National Commission on Excellence in Education launched its error-laden condemnation of public education in 1983 through its publication of A Nation at Risk. Tyack and Cuban characterize that diatribe as "an ideological smoke screen . . . [that] has restricted discussion of educational purposes and obscured rather than clarified the most pressing problems, especially those of the schools that educate the quarter of American students who live...