Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform by David Tyack & Larry Cuban (Harvard University Press, 1995). 

The title alone hooked me. By yoking the idleness implied in “tinkering” and the grand ambitions of “utopia,” Tyack and Cuban both confused and intrigued me. Are all our grand reform plans really no more than tinkering? Or, can we “tinker” our way to an educational utopia? After more than 30 years of working with a variety of school reform efforts, I’ve come to see elements of truth in both possibilities. That’s the power of Tyack and Cuban’s analysis: They detail both the “progress and regress” in schooling, and they show how schooling manages to change in some substantial ways while the basic age-graded, subject-based, teacher-centered, standardized-tested “grammar of schooling” persists. The bad news is that more than 25 years after publication, the key ideas in Tinkering Toward Utopia can still predict and explain why so many large-scale reform efforts continue to fail. As a result, it is the only book that has stayed on the reading list for my School Change course since I first started teaching it in 2000. But there is good news as well: We can use our understanding of why schools are most likely to change slowly and incrementally to understand how to transform education over the long term.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Thomas Hatch

THOMAS HATCH is a professor of education and director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY. He is the author, with Jordon Corson and Sarah Gerth van den Berg, of The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict .