The Futures of School Reform

Jal Mehta is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His primary research interests are in understanding the relationship between knowledge and action; substantively, he is most interested in the policy and politics of creating high-quality schooling at scale. Mehta received his PhD in sociology and social policy from Harvard University. His dissertation, The Transformation of American Educational Policy, 1980-2001, recently received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the AERA politics' section. Mehta is coauthor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (Basic Books, 2004), which was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Allure of Order: The Troubled Quest to Rationalize a Century of American Schooling (Oxford University Press), which charts the growing "rationalization" of American schooling, asking what this shift means for the educational field, for the teaching profession, and for social justice. He is also working on a project, The Chastened Dream, about the limits and possibilities of using social science as a means of achieving social progress.

The Futures of School Reform represents the culminating work of a three-year discussion among national education leaders convened by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Based on the recognition that current education reform efforts have reached their limits, the volume maps out a variety of bold visions that push the boundaries of our current thinking. Taken together, these visions identify the leverage points for generating dramatic change and highlight critical trade-offs among different courses of action. The goal of this book is not to present a menu of options. Rather, it is to surface contrasting assumptions, tensions, constraints, and opportunities, so that together we can better understand--and act on--the choices that lie before us.