2015 Outstanding Book Award, Association for Educational
Communications & Technology (AECT)
A book that explores the problematic connection between education policy
and practice while pointing in the direction of a more fruitful
relationship, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice is a
provocative culminating statement from one of America's most insightful
education scholars and leaders.
Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice takes as its starting point
a strikingly blunt question: "With so many major structural changes in
U.S. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices
been largely stable, with a modest blending of new and old teaching
practices, leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier
generations of school-goers?"
It is a question that ought to be of paramount interest to all who are
interested in school reform in the United States. It is also a question
that comes naturally to Larry Cuban, whose much-admired books have
focused on various aspects of school reform--their promises, wrong
turns, partial successes, and troubling failures. In this book, he
returns to this territory, but trains his focus on the still baffling
fact that policy reforms--no matter how ambitious or determined--have
generally had little effect on classroom conduct and practice.
Cuban explores this problem from a variety of angles. Several chapters
look at how teachers, in responding to major policy initiatives,
persistently adopt changes and alter particular routine practices while
leaving dominant ways of teaching largely undisturbed. Other chapters
contrast recent changes in clinical medical practice with those in
classroom teaching, comparing the practical effects of varying medical
and education policies. The book's concluding chapter distills important
insights from these various explorations, taking us inside the "black
box" of the book's title: those workings that have repeatedly
transformed dramatic policy initiatives into familiar--and largely
unchanged--classroom practices.
