Confessions of a School Reformer

In Confessions of a School Reformer, eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. With a keen historian's eye, Cuban expands his personal narrative to analyze the overlapping social, political, and economic movements that have attempted to influence public schooling in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. Interwoven with Cuban's evaluations and remembrances are his "confessions," in which he accounts for the beliefs he held and later rejected, as well as mistakes and areas of weakness that he has found in his own ideology. Ultimately, Cuban remarks with a tempered optimism on what schools can and cannot do in American democracy. "In this remarkable book, Larry Cuban provides rich insight into nearly a century of American school reform. In chapters that alternate between analysis and memoir, he explores both our persisting faith that schools can fix social problems and our continuing failure to move the needle very far in this direction--drawing on his long experience as a student, teacher, superintendent, and professor." --David Labaree, Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Education "Larry Cuban knows more about school reform than anybody in America. And he knows it from both his personal experience and his historical scholarship, as this bracingly honest book confirms. Over and over, across a brilliant six-decade career, Cuban has urged us to improve our schools and to restrain our expectations of them. If that sounds like a contradiction to you, read Confessions of a School Reformer. You might reform your own ideas about schools, just like Larry Cuban did." --Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education, University of Pennsylvania and author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools Larry Cuban is Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University.