What counts as a good school? A conversation with Larry Cuban

Abstract

Kappan’s editor talks with education historian Larry Cuban about the various ways Americans have judged the quality of schools and the success of various efforts to improve schools. For much of the 20th century, efficiency was the watchword, as schools adopted scientific management techniques from the business sector. By the mid-1960s, that goal was subsumed by a focus on effectiveness, which required that schools find ways to measure the outcomes of their efforts. At the same time, alternative models have emerged, challenging the idea that there’s only one “best” way of doing school.

Theory of action: The care and feeding of your mission

“…And each of those goals can be adapted and reinterpreted. (Heller, 2020) Choosing one or another of these paths to success in a vacuum, without communicating with stakeholders about what we expect schools to do for students, limits our ability to be innovative and keeps the logic of what we do away from the teachers, families, and students who deserve to understand it the most.…”

The dynamic tension at the core of the grammar of schooling

“…Consider the age-graded classroom, which Cuban highlights as a prime case of a reform that succeeded (Heller, 2020). It emerged before the Civil War, in the period when the common school movement established the first U.S. system of universal public education, and it quickly became entrenched because it served an important social mission and it met organizational needs, thereby satisfying both of our essential criteria.…”

“…As David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) famously observed, they make up something like a basic, underlying "grammar of schooling." (On this and related topics, see Cuban's recent interview in Kappan; Heller, 2020. ) Tyack and Cuban's concept has inspired a lot of scholarship over the last 25 years (including, most recently, a special issue of the American Journal of Education on "Changing the grammar of schooling"; see Mehta & Datnow, 2020), nearly all of it focusing on what it would take -and why it's so dicult -to dislodge those core practices that seem to stand in the way of more progressive approaches.…”