Bad Students Not Bad Schools by Robert Weissberg, U of Illinois professor emeritus of political science, is a throwback to highly traditional education when principals exercised the power to throw kids out. This easy read, colorfully written with a degree of exaggeration, ultimately lapses in frustration at how to fix schools. Several chapters describe the failures of many efforts at reforming schools with big money, big ideas and big organizations. These are some of the best and most useful parts of the book evidencing considerable research.
Weissberg skewers movements like diversity and equity as distracting for educators and destructive to goals of academic achievement. Weissberg’s single focused interest in academics would eliminate students without demonstrated school success. He has no time for the whole child and other “soft” movements or even the choice movement though he seems ambivalent on that.
We are beginning to see a spate of articles along the lines of Bad Students impatient with the pace of academic achievement and irritated in general with immigration, rights, mandates and law suits. The new Core Standards, constant calls for rigor, increased testing and graduation exams remind me of the 1950s when Why Johnny Can’t Read and other books launched attacks on public education that put educators on the defensive for a decade until Kohl, Dennison, Holt, Silberman and others questioned seats bolted to the floor education. Bad Students Not Bad Schools needs to be read and confronted to better understand the many uncomfortable people frustrated with current schooling.