ABSTRACT
It is no secret that teaching the way Becker does is a complex undertaking.Learning to teach that way hinges on contributions from a number of facets of a loosely coupled system of education in the United States.1 That the system is indeed loosely coupled increases the complexity and broadens and deepens the challenges involved. In part, the demise of the Amherst Project in the 1970s, in which similar efforts to reform history teaching were taken on, could perhaps be traced to this loose coupling. Although the educational system and the preparation of teachers for it have become more centralized and tightly linked since the 1970s, policy control over it remains rather diffuse. Despite efforts by states to wrest control away from local education agencies and centralize, say, curricular requirements, and the federal government’s attempts to tell states what to do, much of the daily decision making and policy applications still occur at local school and school-district levels.
