ABSTRACT
On the other hand, educational reformers have responded to the crises in public education by primarily offering solutions that either ignore the roles of teachers in preparing learners to be active and critical citizens, or they suggest reforms that ignore the intelligence, judgment, and experience that teachers might bring to bear on such issues. The call for excellence and improved student creativity has been accompanied by policy suggestions that further erode the power teachers have over the conditions of their work while simultaneously proposing that administrators and teachers look outside of their schools for improvements and needed reforms. The result is that many of the educational reforms appear to reduce teachers to the status of low-level employees or civil servants whose main function is to implement reforms decided by experts in the upper levels of state and educational bureaucracies. Furthermore, such reforms embrace technological solutions that undermine the historical and cultural specificity of school life and further weaken the possibilities for school administrators and teachers to work with parents and local groups to improve schools. Underlying the paradox at work in the discourse of school reform is a dual failure: first, there is the growing public failure to recognize the
central role that teachers must play in any viable attempt to revitalize the public schools; secondly, the failure to recognize that the ideological and political interests underlying the dominant thrusts in school reform are at odds with the traditional role of organizing public education around the need to educate students for the maintenance and defense of the traditions and principles necessary for a democratic society.
