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Title: The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace by Arthur G. Powell, Eleanor Farrar, David K. Cohen, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of Independent Schools Commission on Educational ISBN: 0-395-37904-0 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Pub. Date: 01 September, 1985 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: A must-read for secondary educators
Comment: This is the best book I've read on secondary education. Most educators would agree that small schools--where teachers and students know each other well and cooperate on meaningful work--are incredibly effective. However, standard high schools are large and chaotic places where students and teachers go through the motions and not much of great intellectual significance ever happens. Rather, they are like shopping malls, where customers (students) go into stores (classrooms) and are offered goods (knowledge) by merchants (teachers).

We convince ourselves, though, that large, shopping mall-style high schools provide a "choice" for students, and grant them numerous "opportunities" to achieve. (Customers can choose whether they want to buy what the merchant is selling.) Writing in a similar style as "Horace's Compromise"--what Ted Sizer calls "fictional non-fiction"--the authors challenge the notion that big is better, and that more content equates to more learning. They demonstrate how truly ineffective schools are when they force teachers to see 160 students a day for only 50 minutes at a time.

The book wraps up with a detailed history of secondary schooling in the United States that demonstrates how we got to a place where we expect schools to do so much that they cannot do any of it well. If you are a secondary teacher in a large high school, I highly recommend this book.

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