Political Spectacle and the Fate of American Schools

This timely and important project is both critical and constructive. As educational policy becomes one of our major political backgrounds, the connection between politics and policy is both underscored and criticized. Mary Lee Smith and her associates take their criticism one decisive step further, examining the transitive relation between politics and actual classroom practice. They shows that educational policy serves as political propaganda directed at an electorate desperate for change, and they refocus current educational debates, casting them in their true partisan light while demonstrating how the public can recognize symbolic policies and participate in the creation of policy that truly serves the public good.