edited by Margaret C. Wang and Herbert J. Walberg
2002
The endlessly productive Herbert J. Walberg and the late Margaret C. Wang edited this 400-page volume, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Arising from a Wingspread conference, it offers four chapters on school choice programs (by Walberg and Joseph Bast, Bruno Manno, Terry Moe and Paul Peterson) and six on systemic reform (which the editors prefer to term "best systems"), these being by Kenneth Wong, Margaret Wang and JoAnn Manning, Diana Lam, Education Secretary (then Houston superintendent) Rod Paige and Susan Sclafani, John Bishop and Ferran Mane, and James Guthrie. The editors do their level best (in an epilogue) to distill commonalities and shared lessons from both reform strategies, but their more useful contribution is to explain how and why the two approaches are "reconcilable and, in fact, being reconciled in policy and practice," a proposition I also advanced in last week's Education Gadfly (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=60#864). The ISBN is 0805834877 and you can buy a paperback copy for $32.50 (or a hard cover for a lot more) from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, NJ 07439. Surf to www.erlbaum.com/Books/searchintro/BookDetailscvr.cfm?ISBN=0-8058-3487-7. Or phone (800) 926-6579 or e-mail [email protected].
