Should educators pay students? Should they make them wear sunglasses, regulate their clothing, allow them to bring animals into classrooms, discourage them from playing videogames, or transform their schools into gymnasiums? These are some of the suggestions that Cockeyed Education examines. This book enables readers to differentiate substantive from cockeyed suggestionsfor improving schools.. It directs them to the suggestions that scholastic experts, politicians, and members of the public have made. Additionally, it introduces them to the case method. It helps them apply this analytical technique to events that range from early Chicago schooling to the 2009 economic stimulus package.

Parents have questions for school administrators. They want to know how they hire teachers, erect facilities, select learning materials, protect students, allocate budgets, use data, make forecasts, measure progress, and compete with for-profit schools. This book examines the questions they pose, the answers they elicit, the allies they attract, the adversaries they arouse, and the improvements they prod.

Parents had reasons to be alarmed about school technology. They had been warned that these abuses could influence their children’s academic progress, motivation, communication, creativity, critical thinking, job preparedness, and even their safety at school. They had been told that it was linked to controversial instruction, faulty testing, inadequate textbooks, and invasive spyware. Upset by these claims, the parents had numerous questions. This book identifies their questions, the groups to which they directed them, the answers they elicited, and the educational changes they prompted.

Lopsided Schools introduces readers to the case method and helps the reader to use the case method to examine the scholastic challenges that critics posed from World War I to the present. Some critics have stirred up educators with threats to reduce their budgets or fire them. Others upset them with disconcerting questions. Should parents demand that their children learn speed reading? Should teachers emphasize vocational activities? Should principals train their own successors? Should superintendents award bonuses to teachers? Should employers hire the graduates with the highest scores on standardized tests? Should politicians assume greater responsibility for schooling? Should journalists publicize information about lopsided schools? This book examines these and the numerous other questions that critics posed.

Parents want teachers to explain how they instruct children. They become annoyed when the teachers are silent or surly. Parents counter with explicit, common sense questions: how do teachers arouse interest, design curricula, reinforce discipline, assign grades, designate textbooks, and select technology? This book examines the parents' questions, the answers they elicited, the allies they attracted, and the improvements they initiated.

Early and recent school reformers demanded greater funding. They insisted that they needed it to protect children, the economy, and the nation. This book uses the case method to analyze the budgets that they proposed, the rhetoric that they employed, and the resistance that they encountered.

Parents wondered exactly what was transpiring in classrooms. Although they asked their children, they did not have complete confidence in their responses. When they quizzed teachers, school administrators, school board members, and politicians, they realized that they sometimes had conflicting interests. They resolved to get the information they wanted on their own: they would examine classroom textbooks. This book recounts the common sense questions that parents posed about these materials.