After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of School Reform

Over the past decade, education policy has come to be defined by business leaders who have brought their expertise and market-based perspective to the challenge of improving K-12 education. They have promoted a top-down, carrot-and-stick corporate model that targets teachers as the principal culprit for all that ails public schools, rather than the collaborative, systems-oriented, continuous-improvement approach that has characterized both the quality and open-source software movements. Moreover, wealthy philanthropists are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to ensure that their vision of education reform prevails. In this talk, Andrea Gabor, author of After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, will discuss the practical and ethical problems with the dominant model of business- minded education reforms, as well as the promise of alternatives approaches.

Prof. Gabor is the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College at the City University of New York. She is a former editor at both BusinessWeek and U.S. News & World Report. She has also written for, among others, The New York Times, Newsweek, Fortune and The Smithsonian. Her previous books include The Man Who Discovered Quality: How W. Edwards Deming Brought the Quality Revolution to America and The Capitalist Philosophers.

In addition to teaching at Baruch, Prof. Gabor was an adjunct professor for eight years at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, helping teach Critical Issues in International Economics. At Columbia, she remains a judge for applicants to the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics. Her main areas of interest and expertise are biography, management, education, the workplace, and international and local economic issues.