R&L Education
Pages: 296
•
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-57886-227-6 • Paperback • May 2005 • $53.00 • (£41.00)
978-1-4616-5515-2 • eBook • May 2005 • $50.00 • (£38.00)
Cheri Pierson Yecke, an award-winning teacher and noted author, lecturer, and researcher, has served as the Secretary of Education for Virginia, the Commissioner of Education for Minnesota, and as a senior official with the U.S. Department of Education. A highly regarded and influential education reformer, Yecke is the Distinguished Senior Fellow for Education and Social Policy at the Center of the American Experiment.
Part 1 Foreword by William J. Bennett
Part 2 Preface
Part 3 Prologue
Chapter 4 1. Introduction
Chapter 5 2. The Growth of the Middle School Movement
Chapter 6 3. Middle School Curriculum
Chapter 7 4. Ability Grouping
Chapter 8 5. Cooperative Learning
Chapter 9 6. Peer Tutoring
Chapter 10 7. Analysis of Beliefs and Driving Convictions
Chapter 11 8. Activist Implementation
Chapter 12 9. Ethical Considerations
Chapter 13 10. Implications for the Twenty-First Century
Part 14 Appendices
Part 15 Selected Bibliography
Part 16 Index
Cheri Yecke has made a profoundly important contribution to education policy research. Her meticulously documented study exposes the ongoing threat to the academic achievement of middle school students. She chronicles the destructive agenda of social hygienists and educational theorists to put a glass ceiling on student achievement in the name of an equity of mediocrity. And it shows what parents and policymakers can do to protect the integrity of this nation's public education.
— Michael Poliakoff, president, National Council on Teacher Quality
Cheri Pierson Yecke's [book] illustrates a vital but poorly understood aspect of education policy making: Educational improvement campaigns are often infused with social engineering motives. Dr. Yecke does an extraordinary job of documenting how the American Middle School Movement has become just such a campaign. Parents and policymakers often endorse educational innovations without any real understanding of how or whether they work. With regard to the Middle School Movement however, they can read The War on Excellence and judge for themselves...
— Dr. John E. Stone, president, Education Consumers ClearingHouse & Consultants Network
Cheri Yecke offers a chilling yet accurate account of how an army of elite educators can successfully manufacture an adolescent crisis that resulted in the flawed middle school concept. That concept, by every measure, has failed our students and shortchanged their abilities.
— Jeanne Allen, president, Center for Education Reform
The War against Excellence reveals the left's agenda that is turning public schools into academic wastelands. That the American middle school is an educational wasteland is not news, but in Dr. Yecke we finally have someone who convincingly reveals how middle schools were led down the paths of political correctness, academic sloth, and mediocre achievement—all of which endanger the American way of life. The results of Dr. Yecke's extensive research will frighten every parent in America, for although the liberals will deny it, their battle plan has now been laid bare and their covert means of using public schools to implement left-wing egalitarian ideas are exposed for all to see. This book is a manifesto for parental control of education.
— Michelle Easton, president, Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute
This lucid and passionate book does two great services for today's education policy debates. It shows—and explains—the extent to which American education has shamelessly turned 'giftedness' from a blessing and asset into an embarrassing mark of 'elitism.' And it begins the overdue task of unmasking the 'middle school' for what it has all too often become: not an educational institution where children learn important skills and knowledge but a social engineering vehicle that attends endlessly to dogma and dreamy notions while teaching very little. That turns out to be particularly damaging to the ablest of our children, on whom so much of our future will depend.
— Chester E. Finn Jr., president, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Cheri Pierson Yecke's [book] illustrates a vital but poorly understood aspect of education policy making: Educational improvement campaigns are often infused with social engineering motives. Dr. Yecke does an extraordinary job of documenting how the American Middle School Movement has become just such a campaign. Parents and policymakers often endorse educational innovations without any real understanding of how or whether they work. With regard to the Middle School Movement however, they can read The War on Excellence and judge for themselves.
— Dr. John E. Stone, president, Education Consumers ClearingHouse & Consultants Network