Nation at Thought

David Steiner is Executive Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and Professor of Education at Johns Hopkins University. He previously served as a member of the Maryland State Board of Education and as Commissioner of Education for New York State. He holds degrees from Oxford University (B.A. and M.A.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.).

The first three chapters of former New York State Education Commissioner David M. Steiner’s new polemic follows in a long tradition of conservative policy makers’ critique of the state of schooling in the US. One thinks of California State Superintendent of Instruction Max Rafferty’s popular 1962 book Suffer, Little Children. Like Rafferty, Steiner advances familiar tropes about the decline of academic achievement, as measured by standardized assessments, due primarily to poorly prepared teachers who have been trained in progressivist schools of education. “Schools of education are largely [John] Dewey’s children,” Steiner claims (p. 67). Cultural heterogeneity and Dewey’s relativistic epistemology have confused educational aims and fragmented the traditional curriculum, compelling teachers to focus on such distractors as “the whole child,” critical thinking, social-emotional learning, growth mindset, GRIT, metacognition, and the like, and not on standard curriculum content. His critique of these straw men is ham-handed stuff, but the author redeems himself in chapter 4 by providing a well-reasoned analysis of the shortcomings of the basic skills orientation to literacy found in the Common Core State Standards and the work of E. D. Hirsch. A concluding chapter creatively taps Aristotle for newly defined purposes for secondary schooling. Highly recommended. All readership levels.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroductionProlegomena: The Collective Good of EducationChapter 1: The Unmet Goals of American SchoolingChapter 2: The Great DistractorsChapter 3: What Works—And Why We Don’t Do ItChapter 4: The “Main Idea” in K-12 educationChapter 5: Learning to ThinkBibliographyIndex