Harvard Graduate School of Education

Reviews of So Much Reform, So Little Change:


From Education Next:

“Payne, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, here sets out to explain ‘the sociology of failure’ of urban reform. Drawing primarily on his experiences in Chicago, Payne considers the effects of social context, poverty, race, bureaucracy, and organizational dynamics, and uses them to raise hard questions for both progressive and conservative reformers.”
—excerpt from book review in Education Next, Winter 2009

From Book News, Inc.:

"Payne (social service administration, University of Chicago) has taught in the trenches, which helps explain why his work is so full of passion. He looks at the many attempts to 'fix' school systems in an effort to find out why most of them have failed."
—excerpt from book review in Book News Inc., August 2008

From The Education Gadfly:

“Especially worthwhile is his final chapter on the blindspots and follies of both conservative and progressive school-reform ideologies--and the very last paragraph of his epilogue, evoking how little about the core of education has changed since the lessons his own father learned in the classrooms of a great African-American eighth-grade teacher named William J. Moore.”
—excerpt from book review in The Education Gadfly, May 2008

From University of Chicago Magazine:

“In a book out this May, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2008), [Payne] argues that rather than searching for the silver-bullet program that will turn a school around, would-be reformers must strike at the 'culture of failure' that perpetuates dismal school performance.”
—excerpt from book review in University of Chicago Magazine, May/June 2008

Back to book.