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Democratic Learning: The Challenge to School Effectivenessreviewed by Daniel C. Elliott - 2005 ![]() Author(s): John Macbeath and Lejf Moos Publisher: Routledge/Falmer, New York ISBN: 0415326966 , Pages: 208, Year: 2004 Search for book at Amazon.com Around the democratic world schooling has evolved over time. It would seem that the reforms so prevalent in the
The theme of the book, “democracy,” is by the authors’ design the desired theme of the common or public schooling engine that should drive and equip every free democratic society. Authors present and debate definitions of democratic principles and of democracy itself when applied to schooling content, teaching processes, and institutional management.
But the book is not for the casual observers of schools. The high level vocabulary and frequent use of unfamiliar terms, acronyms, and issues familiar only to well-informed educators and educational scholars will frustrate those not already schooled in educational reform history and practice. Some of the chapters are quite interesting and read with ease while others simply bog down in quasi-research details that seem to distract from, rather than contribute to, the point at hand—the impact and need for schools driven by the engine of internal democracy.
The philosophical divergence between the authors from the
Kathryn Reily weighs in with the
Karen Seashore Louis responds from the
Mats Ekholm discusses school democratic changes and focuses on his research findings from Swedish schools across the latter half of the 20th century. He aligns his findings with those of Michael Fullan in the 1990’s and asserts that there needed to be reframing of the discussion from negative to positive issues about what is good in schooling and what people directly connected with schools really want. He cites powerful evidence from the Swedish effective schools literature consistent with other findings in other countries across the last century. The most effective democratic learning systems were ones where teachers remained with students for a period of years as they progressed through their age-advancing curriculum but at their own pace. This well-documented fact has gone largely ignored by most in the public school industry due to its disquieting implications about adult inconvenience.
Peter Schultz Jorgensen introduces us to the raging political debates about children’s rights across the face of the democratic globe. He points out that politically liberal concepts infusing education would initiate a backlash from the large numbers of politically conservative people in the various democratic nations. Jorgenson suggests that the two sides ought to be more realistic about their proposals, realizing they are inflaming each other, and that children are not necessarily well served by either system. He advocates better communication about truth.
Michael Schratz and Loffler-Anzbock present a discussion that does not quite live up to its racy title. “The Darker Side of Democracy” brings up images of the ominous social control philosophies noted by Schultz in the previous chapter. But, in fact all this chapter discusses is the process of leading children to take, analyze, and present a series of black and white pictures to represent what they see their schools to be. He reports dialogue among group members that seems quite cute but does not particularly inform this weighty debate.
“Democratic Leadership in an Age of Managerial Accountability,” by Jorunn Moller reflects the huge pressure that most schoolteachers and administrators are chafing under in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. His analyses of the research literature highlights the truth that ‘democracy in learning’ is more an idealized notion than a factual reality when one asks parents, students, teachers, and even administrators. He points to a power struggle that is being won by the bureaucrats and mega-organizations, and lost by parents and students with regard to the best options for schooling.
Alma Harris discusses the divergence between managerial influences upon school policy by clarifying key characteristics of the approaches to school leadership. Her arguments are very reminiscent of the “shared decision-making” literature across the USA in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Her study points out what every graduate from an administrator training program has written papers about in the past two years—that effective school leadership requires vision with values, distributive leadership, true staff-development owned by staff, genuine positive relationships among leaders and teachers, and all built into a sense of what she calls “community” but what others call “family.”
Kai-ming Cheng analyzes changes in business workplaces within democratic societies and correlates those to a series of lists about school improvement that include some very interesting observations: expansion of opportunities, movement away from age-centered structures, flexible time-tables, and especially strengthening higher education to catch up with the school reform movements.
Democratic Learning: The Challenge to School Effectiveness is something that I have profited from by reading, but not something I will recommend to young students of education. They simply will not understand it in its proper context. I agree with the statement on the back cover that the book is most powerfully aimed at research investigators and school leaders seeking to understand powerful sociological influences that impact their efforts to improve school learning outcomes for students and to impact our democratic societies more significantly. or several years.
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