When Best Doesn’t Equal Good

Educational Reform & Teacher Recruitment

A Longitudinal Study

by

James T. Sears, J. Dan Marshall, & Amy Otis-Wilborn

"Based on their ambitious six-year study of five ‘academically talented’ individuals as they move through a special teacher education program at an ‘elite’ college and are inducted into the ‘profession’ of teaching, Sears, Marshall, and Otis-Wilborn provide an important counterpoint to the educational reform rhetoric of the 1980s." —Mark B. Ginsburg, University of Pittsburgh

"[This book] extends the intersecting questions of structure/agency and constraint/possibility that frame much of the contemporary school reform literature. [The authors] challenge the potential of current reform efforts and question systems of valuation that suggest what ‘best’ is, why and under what conditions ‘best’ equals good, and, of course, who decides. A must read for those genuinely interested in another perspective on the school reform debate."

—Diane DuBose Brunner, Michigan State University

The first research-based book to examine the impact of the teacher education reform of the 1980s and to provide a critical analysis. The authors capture the everyday trials and triumphs of five young people who became Bridenthal Interns in their senior year of high school and completed their internship as seasoned classroom teachers. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, this book is one of the few research-based longitudinal studies of becoming a teacher and the only book documenting this journey with the ‘brightest and the best.’ A welcome addition to courses, researchers of qualitative/ethnographic methods, longitudinal studies, and policy analysis issues will also find it of compelling interest.

2002/320 pp./paper $31.95t/ISBN: 1-891928-11-2