Dear Commons Community,

Last year, my colleague Joel Spring and I published The Great American Education-Industrial Complex: Ideology, Technology, and Profit  (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).  On Friday, the Teachers College Record, had a review of it written by David Casalaspi.  The review points out the book’s strengths as well as the problems of researching difficult topics such as education policy, decision making, and political influence.  Joel and I appreciate and support Mr. Casalaspi’s conclusion:

“while other scholars have written in more detail about individual components of the complex, Picciano and Spring adumbrate a much more comprehensive, realistic and fluid portrait of educational governance than has been portrayed in recent literature.  Their acknowledgement that shifts in governance over the past few decades have empowered unelected elites and challenged traditional democratic power structures is an important one—and something that certainly demands the scrutiny of a democratic public.”

Tony