This powerful book shows the many unintended ways in which social and educational policy can shape, if not constrain, the work of educating students. Focusing on the creation and history of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) from its inception in 1965 to the present, Stein shows how underlying assumptions of policymakers and bureaucratic red tape actually interfere with both educational practice and the goals of the legislation itself. This examination is especially timely, given the recent passage of the No Child Left Behind Act and its sweeping attempts to raise achievement and reduce failure, especially for underserved populations. This invaluable volume: Offers an innovative framework for the analysis of education policy that can be applied to other government initiatives, particularly those directed at the poor. Challenges prevailing assumptions about children and poverty and the organizational strategies for addressing their needs. Brings the reader into the halls of Congress, analyzing the language of Congressional floor debates, showing shifts in how students have been characterized and their needs defined over time. Presents a fresh perspective on the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, the most recent reauthorization of ESEA, as well as federal desegregation and bilingual policies. Provides intimate portraits of nine elementary schools, presenting the language and routines of schooling to demonstrate how practitioners react to the culture of education policy in practice. “This book breaks new ground! Stein demonstrates the ways in which the language and symbols that are used work to delimit not only our understanding of the problems federal policy addresses, but the range of solutions it deploys. A foundational piece of work.” —Jean Anyon, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Revisiting “The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change” provocatively and seamlessly joins Seymour Sarason’s classic, landmark text on school change with his own insightful re?ections on those same issues in the face of today’s crisis in public schools. This is an extensive, monograph–length revisiting. Part I of this book reproduces the second edition of Sarason’s ground–breaking work, The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change, in which he detailed how change can affect a school’s culturally diverse environment—either through the implementation of new programs or as a result of federally imposed regulations. Throughout, many of the major assumptions about change in institutions are challenged. Speci?c events and examples demonstrate that any attempt to implement change involves some existing regularity within the school. Dr. Sarason also takes a close look at government involvement in change efforts in schooling—and includes a detailed examination of current efforts to implement PL 94–142 into public schools. He presents compelling evidence that the federal effort to change and improve schools has largely been a failure. Also included are investigations into the purposes of schooling and how these purposes can be affected by change, and the process by which educators and administrators formulate intended outcomes of change efforts. In Part II, Dr. Sarason “revisits” the text and the issues 25 years after the original publication. As he explains in his preface, to him the word crisis means “a point in time when a dangerous situation contains con?icting forces of an intensity or seriousness that in the near term will be dramatically altered depending on which forces win out. When I wrote the book a quarter century ago, I did not regard our schools as in crisis...[though] my intuition . . . was that a crisis would come sooner or later. It has, in my opinion, come.” Believing that “what happens in our cities and our schools will determine the fate of our society,” Dr. Sarason is deeply concerned that the reform arena is being manipulated by forces that are at best untroubled by and at worst intent on the dismantling of the public school system. That, coupled with his fear that even the system’s defenders are not focusing on the real issues, has infused Dr. Sarason’s return to the topic of educational change with a great sense of urgency. The important things he has to say will be welcomed by all who truly care about the state of the public schools that America’s children attend.