New Book For Educators on Reform
By Merri Rosenberg

What should have been a gripping read about some of the most compelling educational issues facing educators, politicians and parents today instead turns out to be a fairly tedious slog that is the literary equivalent of taking one’s medicine because one should.

The promise of the provocative title Children as Pawns never quite delivers in this undeniably thorough, well researched and carefully argued book. The author has obviously done his homework, and, graded on effort alone, would undoubtedly deserve an A-plus for effort. What’s missing is any sense of the passion that informs, say, a comparable work by a Robert Cole.

Hacsi leaves no research study unturned that has anything at all to bear on the five sensitive school reform issues that he addresses here: Head Start, bilingual education, class size, social promotion and school financing. Any one of these topics could have (and should have) made for pulse-quickening reading. Instead, perhaps because of the author’s thoroughness and research orientation, the lay reader is lost in a thicket of analysis about various and sundry studies concerning each one of these topics.

Although the book is billed as ‘written for a broad audience,’ according to its public relations materials, Hacsi is really writing for the educational cognoscenti–be they professors of education at the nation’s finest graduate schools, or educational policy wonks at think tanks and on Congressional staffs. This is hardly the stuff of bedside reading for your classroom teacher, or building principal–and I suspect that most school superintendents simply wouldn’t have time to wade through all this material. And probably all a parent or PTA leader should do is duck quickly into one or two chapters whose topics are closest to their own interests.

The heart of Hacsi’s argument here is essentially this: “The simple fact is that in some instances, broader societal conflicts shape schooling.” He continues, “If we really want to improve our schools, one of the things we need to do is recognize that we will never have absolute knowledge...School officials, teachers and parent groups should push for more knowledgeable education reform–and for the long-term planning we will need to guide us on any number of issues. We have run blind for too long as it is.” With each of the issues he addresses, Hacsi offers a complete history of the topic, provides examples of previous–and frequently competing and contradictory studies that have sought to determine whether or not a program works, and attempts to come up with some sort of conclusion about what kinds of policy steps should be taken.

Hacsi rightly points out that, during the past two decades, educational reform issues have surfaced as a critical agenda for those seeking political office on the local, state and national level. His argument is that before politicians and others embrace a particular reform, which can have significant and serious consequences for students and schools, all the parties involved should be as well informed as possible about what the relevant research would suggest.

After making my way through this, I felt frustrated. I wish that the author had written a challenging 1200-word Op Ed piece that would have communicated his ideas in a clearer fashion, and rendered his message more accessible to a general audience.#

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