Peter Schrag, The New Press
2003
Peter Schrag is one of the wisest, most erudite and education-savvy journalists in America. The author of nine earlier books, he's also a thoughtful, old-fashioned liberal who believes in such time-honored liberal values as fairness, adequacy, and equality. This well-wrought 300-page volume does a fine job of making the case for "adequacy" in education funding and services without papering over the need for such resources to be well-crafted, effectively executed, and carried out within a framework of standards, assessments, and results-based accountability. Indeed, Schrag expertly fuses the "we need more resources to do right by poor kids" strand of contemporary education thought with standards-based reform. Inspired by various state-specific lawsuits that in recent years have shifted their emphasis from simple spending equity to the concept of resource "adequacy," Schrag comes to this stirring conclusion: "For all the questions it raises, the adequacy argument is also a sophisticated and passionate declaration of faith in the great promises of American society. . . . A lot of fateful questions hang on how well we succeed--questions about social will, about the extent to which schools can do the enormous tasks assigned to them, about human potential and the capability of all children to succeed regardless of . . . background, about the sincerity of all those professions that children are our most valuable resource, and about democracy itself." No mere polemic, this closely reasoned book is respectful toward some of the prominent analysts (e.g. Coleman, Hanushek) whose work has made it nearly impossible for mere polemics about school resources to gain traction in the modern era. The ISBN is 1565848217 and you can get more information at http://www.thenewpress.com/newbooks/finaltest.htm.
