Radical Reformers

I have structured this book to end with an essay on the parameters of educational history . My research in this and other books leads me to believe that there were three great reform movements in education and that there will be no more : an end to educational history . These movements have been the Progressive movement in the early part of the century the Equity movement of the !960s and 1970s the Excellence Reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s . The influence of the left in American education parallels emergence of these three great movements occasioned by societal pressures. I begin the book with a consideration of the major progressive educators most socially minded : John Dewey and George S. Counts and their huge influence on American education . I proceed to the radicalism of the American Federation of Teachers Afl-CIO . I examine as case studies the two teacher unions in New York City : the Communist led Teachers Union and the Socialist led Teachers Guild which reemerged as the United Federation of Teachers . The influence of the teacher unions emerges in the Equity reform movement shaped by the Civil Rights Movement. Next I examine the life and work of the major Critical Theorists in education Stanley Aronowitz Henry Giroux and Michael Apple . They emerge during the conservative Excellence Reform Movement as major critical voices on the Left whose influence has now become mainstream ..For example three recent textbooks by mainstream educators indicate the power of the these Critical Theorists . Eliot W. Eisner THE EDUCATIONAL IMAGINATION : ON THE DESIGN AND EVAULATION OF SCHOOL PROGRAMS (3rd Edition 2002) David C. Armstrongs CURRICULUM TODAY (2003) and Howard A. Ozman and Samuel M. Cravens PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION (7th Edition 2003) are but a few of the textbooks that prominently feature the work of Aronowitz Giroux and Apple .There is even THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGY READER edited by Antonia Darder Marta Baltodano and Rodolfo D. Torres published in 2003. I conclude in the final essay that there has been a legacy of the Left in American education that benefits Americas schoolchildren.