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Here, veteran teacher Cheri Pierson Yecke details the chronological history of the middle school movement in the U. S. by tracing its evolution from academically-oriented junior high schools to the dissolution of academics in the middle schools of the late 1980s and beyond. In this book, evidence is presented to show how leaders of this movement designed to use the middle school as a vehicle to promote non-academic goals, contrary to the desires of parents and the community. Favored instructional practices—such as the elimination of ability grouping and the rise in cooperative learning and peer tutoring—have produced coerced egalitarianism, where education performance is equalized by bringing the achievement of gifted and high ability students down to the level of mediocrity.
The War against Excellence examines the impact of:
·The reduction of academic expectations
·Widespread elimination of ability grouping
Features include:
·Examples of how favored middle school instructional practices have been implemented in other countries, and
·An analysis on the implications of these changes for the future of our country
The influence of these changes has seriously crippled our middle schools in their obligation to provide a solid academic foundation for all students. Yecke provides research-based information that will appeal to parents and educators who want to confront problems with specific instructional practices and improve public education.
- Sales Rank: #2155180 in eBooks
- Published on: 2005-05-12
- Released on: 2013-03-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Cheri Yecke has made a profoundly important contribution to education policy research. Her meticulously documented study exposes the ongoing threat to the academic achievement of middle school students. She chronicles the destructive agenda of social hygienists and educational theorists to put a glass ceiling on student achievement in the name of an equity of mediocrity. And it shows what parents and policymakers can do to protect the integrity of this nation's public education. (Michael Poliakoff, president, National Council on Teacher Quality)
Cheri Pierson Yecke's [book] illustrates a vital but poorly understood aspect of education policy making: Educational improvement campaigns are often infused with social engineering motives. Dr. Yecke does an extraordinary job of documenting how the American Middle School Movement has become just such a campaign. Parents and policymakers often endorse educational innovations without any real understanding of how or whether they work. With regard to the Middle School Movement however, they can read The War on Excellence and judge for themselves... (Dr. John E. Stone, president, Education Consumers ClearingHouse & Consultants Network)
Cheri Yecke offers a chilling yet accurate account of how an army of elite educators can successfully manufacture an adolescent crisis that resulted in the flawed middle school concept. That concept, by every measure, has failed our students and shortchanged their abilities. (Jeanne Allen, president, Center for Education Reform)
The War against Excellence reveals the left's agenda that is turning public schools into academic wastelands. That the American middle school is an educational wasteland is not news, but in Dr. Yecke we finally have someone who convincingly reveals how middle schools were led down the paths of political correctness, academic sloth, and mediocre achievement―all of which endanger the American way of life. The results of Dr. Yecke's extensive research will frighten every parent in America, for although the liberals will deny it, their battle plan has now been laid bare and their covert means of using public schools to implement left-wing egalitarian ideas are exposed for all to see. This book is a manifesto for parental control of education. (Michelle Easton, president, Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute)
This lucid and passionate book does two great services for today's education policy debates. It shows―and explains―the extent to which American education has shamelessly turned 'giftedness' from a blessing and asset into an embarrassing mark of 'elitism.' And it begins the overdue task of unmasking the 'middle school' for what it has all too often become: not an educational institution where children learn important skills and knowledge but a social engineering vehicle that attends endlessly to dogma and dreamy notions while teaching very little. That turns out to be particularly damaging to the ablest of our children, on whom so much of our future will depend. (Chester E. Finn Jr., president, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation)
Cheri Pierson Yecke's [book] illustrates a vital but poorly understood aspect of education policy making: Educational improvement campaigns are often infused with social engineering motives. Dr. Yecke does an extraordinary job of documenting how the American Middle School Movement has become just such a campaign. Parents and policymakers often endorse educational innovations without any real understanding of how or whether they work. With regard to the Middle School Movement however, they can read The War on Excellence and judge for themselves. (Dr. John E. Stone, president, Education Consumers ClearingHouse & Consultants Network)
About the Author
Cheri Pierson Yecke, an award-winning teacher and noted author, lecturer, and researcher, has served as the Secretary of Education for Virginia, the Commissioner of Education for Minnesota, and as a senior official with the U.S. Department of Education. A highly regarded and influential education reformer, Yecke is the Distinguished Senior Fellow for Education and Social Policy at the Center of the American Experiment.
Most helpful customer reviews
67 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
Hurting Our Best and Brightest
By Barry Latzer, American Council of Trustees & Alumni
This is one scary book. Its disturbing message: our middle schools (and presumably, schools at other levels), under the influence of a well-intentioned but pernicious social engineering philosophy, have sacrificed high academic standards, and thwarted the intellectual development of our brightest, highest achieving youngsters.
The author, a mother of schoolchildren frustrated by her dealings with education experts, decided to become one herself. Yecke obtained a doctorate in education to find out why the middle schools were holding back "gifted" students like her own, instead of enabling them to advance as far as their intellects permit.
Her conclusion is that there has been a "radical takeover of middle schools" manifested by three policies: "heterogeneous grouping" (mandating classes of mixed ability; grouping by intellect prohibited), "cooperative learning" (breaking classes into small groups with collective responsibility for work) and "peer tutoring" (smarter students forced to teach the less bright). Yecke carefully documents the sources and evolution of the ideas behind these policies. She persuasively argues that the cumulative effect has been to retard the education of the best students, while dumbing down the curriculum overall.
Yecke is fairly optimistic that the academic standards movement will reverse the mediocrity tide. She asserts that the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind policy, which she sees as a "standards-based reform," is "remaking the educational landscape." However, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that No Child Left Behind is encouraging schools to shift resources away from gifted students in order to meet overall student proficiency requirements. Obviously, whether or not Dr. Yecke's optimism is justified remains to be seen.
It is clear, however, that something must be done to, in Yecke's words, foster a "rebirth of respect for achievement." Schools - and colleges - should be emphasizing the transmission of knowledge, the accumulated wisdom of our (and other) civilizations. They should be enabling our youth to learn as much as they can as fast as they can. When we read the words of a principal (!), who tells us that "When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure, write and spell . . . then we shall be on the road to improving the junior high curriculum," we know that something is decidedly wrong.
Cheri Pierson Yecke has done a great service by pulling together the middle school activists' central policy prescriptions and their supporting arguments and exposing them. Although she has focused on one sector of the K-16 structure, it is obvious that "the war against excellence" has battlefronts at more than one level of the educational system.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
A review from the Trenches of Education
By A Customer
Those critics of Yecke's book who claim that she makes "bizarre" and "unsubstantiated claims" cause me to wonder if they have even bothered to read the text at all. Not only is this one of the most meticulously researched, annotated, and footnoted books I have ever encountered in my nineteen years in the field of education, but it is also one of the most timely in that it deals with pertinent issues, the results of which we can witness in our own society and the fruits of which we will be forced to reckon with as graduates of our dumbed-down educational system begin to take over jobs and leadership positions in our society.
To examine Yecke's credentials is to find a woman infinitely qualified to comment on the current state of our middle schools - she is an honored middle school teacher, she is a respected academic in the field of educational policy, she is a no-nonsense author and administrator of such policy, and (perhaps most importantly) she is a concerned mother of two. But despite all of these elements, she is one of the most amicable, welcoming, and forthright professionals I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. Everything about this woman exudes dedication to a cause greater than her own interests and absolute integrity in execution. Some claim that she is driven by an extreme right-wing agenda because she has served under Republican governors. I must admit that this was my initial prejudice as well. However, immediately upon beginning this book, I found myself faced with issues that know no political classification but are instead universal ones that should be of concern to all Americans. I have discussed this book with colleagues of several political persuasions and the verdict has always been the same: Yecke is correct.
As an educator and an academic, I have nothing but praise for this book, which focuses not only on the problem, but also on the solution. To those who are so quick to condemn The War Against Excellence, I would ask them to read it again -or perhaps for the first time - with an open mind and no political agenda. I have no doubt that they will uncover not only an undeniable pattern of erosion in our public schools, but also the practical and proactive steps for salvaging our educational system and creating a nation of young adults who will have earned a true sense of self-worth through legitimate means of accomplishment, and not some sorry substitute for it masquerading as "self-esteem" but rather consisting of the quiet complacency of apathy.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Review of THE WAR AGAINST EXCELLLENCE
By Jeremiah Reedy
The pursuit of excellence has been an integral part of the Western tradition, contributing much to its unique vitality. To my knowledge no one has doubted the propriety of pursuing excellence; after all who would want to recommend mediocrity? No one, that is, until quite recently. Welcome to the bizarre world of the middle school as revealed to us by Cheri Pierson Yecke in TheWar Against Excellence, The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America?s Middle Schools. It?s the world of "brain periodization," "brain-based curricula," "identity development," "detracking," "untracking," and "transescents." It?s a world where "progressive" educators know better than parents what?s best for their children (Parents aren?t up to date on the latest findings in Ed. Psych.) and high ability students are urged to "succumb to peer pressure and strive not to achieve, or they will risk making their classmates look bad---and their actions might even go so far as to force the non-motivated students to work harder!"
Dr. Yecke?s book, the fruit of seven years of research and writing, is not only a work of impeccable scholarship, it is an expose, guaranteed to make the blood boil of everyone who is interested in genuine education and the future of our country. It is carefully organized, well written, and exceedingly well researched and documented. As Dr. Yecke says, it is a story that had to be told, and a story the basically tells itself through quotations from books, articles and papers delivered at conferences.
The saga begins as Yecke, the mother of two academically talented daughters
and a middle school teacher herself, became disillusioned (an understatement) with "self-proclaimed experts" and their "pseudo-wisdom" who turned the middle school into an "activist movement designed to force radical social changes, regardless of the values or desires of parents, students, or members of the community at large." Yecke returned to graduate school, and earned her doctorate so she could deal with the "so-called experts" as an equal. And that is what she does in this tough, hard-hitting, and much needed book.
The middle school made its debut in the late ?50s and early ?60s. The National Middle School Association (NMSA) was founded in 1973. To most citizens the appearance of middle schools meant simply a new way of organizing the classes, but for their champions it was much more---it was a movement. They saw, rightly of course, that a new structure is easier to change than an existing one. Hence they planned to use, and have been using, the middle school as a "testing ground" to change, first the whole educational system, and then society itself. As one prominent activist, Paul George, put it, the middle school has become "the focus of societal experimentation, the vehicle for movement towards increased justice and equality in the society as a whole." This involved de-emphasizing academic achievement and focusing on alleged personal and social needs of students. As two "authorities" (Johnson and Markle) argue, "By systematically applying attitude change techniques, the chances of developing desirable attitudes among middle school students can be improved." Professor George?s goals are even clearer: schools "are not about taking each child as far as he or she can go. They?re about redistributing the wealth of the future."
To justify the dumbing-down of the curriculum, the social engineers, starting in 1978, made use of a loony, mad scientist theory called "brain periodization." This first cousin of phrenology claims that "brain growth reaches a plateau around the ages of 12-14 at which time ?the brain virtually ceases to grow.?" Hence during this "learning plateau period" it was considered dangerous to introduce "new and challenging material" which could result in "negative neural networks to dissipate the energy of the [challenging] inputs." The NMSA "formally endorsed" this theory in 1981, and the theory reigned supreme for ten years. Even after it was admitted in 1993 that "there is no supporting evidence" for it, its influence lingered on and lingers on even today, sustained by ideology but not by science. Parents who complain of lack of rigor, low expectations, and student boredom are considered "difficult," and papers are delivered at conferences advising teachers how to deal with them.
Meanwhile, the most able students, left high and dry and bored by the abolition of "ethically unacceptable" gifted and talented programs are kept busy with "cooperative learning" and peer tutoring. The utopians did away with spelling bees and honor rolls hoping to breed "competition out of the next generation."
Yecke reveals many more things that are profoundly disturbing. Let me list a few: The attempt to achieve social justice by "making everyone equal" (this means equal outcomes, not just equality of opportunity). The blanket condemnation of competition some forms of which have great social and personal value. The disparagement of academic achievement. The use of cooperative learning to promote group identity at the expense of individual identity. The romantic notions of human nature and the naïve utopianism. And finally, the use of our children to advance a revolutionary social agenda. It is sad to learn that the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundations have played major roles in all of this nonsense.
It should be emphasized that Yecke?s book is a critique of what the educational theorists and activists, mostly professors of education, are proposing, rather than a report on what is actually going on in middle school classrooms. Fortunately, most teachers, relying on common sense, intuition, and experience, know enough to ignore the theories they were required to study while earning their certification. As E.D. Hirsch has said (and I?m sure Dr. Yecke would agree), ideas are the enemy, not people. It is the half-baked theories of professors under pressure to publish that must be exposed, discredited, and rejected.
Finally, I?m sorry that the exorbitant price of this book ($50.00) will prevent many from reading it. It is a book everyone should read.
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