In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform (2012) by John P. Spencer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At first glance the most striking aspect of John Spencer's book is its form.Balancing biography with social and political history, John Spencer uses the story of Marcus Foster to flesh out and articulate dominant themes in the long struggle for urban school reform in America.Spencer's thoughtful analysis of urban education offers much more than methodological innovation, though, just as Foster's story offers much more than the sensational details of his death.While best known for his 1973 assassination at the hands of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the selfproclaimed American revolutionary group that later became famous for kidnapping media heiress Patty Hearst, Foster left behind a notable career as a groundbreaking teacher and administrator.After spearheading impressive turnarounds at several Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, schools, he went on to become the first African American superintendent of the Oakland, California, Unified School District.Following Foster's ascendant career path chronologically, Spencer puts together a thorough and compelling assessment of social history and educational policy in post-World War II America that has much to offer educators, historians, and most of all, perhaps, policymakers.Spencer charts Foster's life path from his childhood in inner-city Philadelphia and his time at Cheyney State Teacher's College in Pennsylvania to his career as a teacher and principal in Philadelphia's public school system and finally, his critical-if sadly truncated-stint as a superintendent in Oakland.He weds the chronology of Foster's life to the history of key reform movements such as intergroup education, bringing students with diverse backgrounds together to emphasize their ability to work together rather than their differences, and compensatory education, a raft of programs designed to address perceived educational and even cultural deficits in some students.This innovative approach works neatly to organize the wide range of material Spencer folds into this rich text.The biography is most compelling in Spencer's early chapters, where he does an excellent job using Foster's youth to frame the challenges of urban education from the student's point of view.Drawing on an impressive array of oral histories, Spencer offers a vivid picture of Foster's upbringing, emphasizing a highly motivated mother who supervised her children closely, pushing them to achieve in school and making sure they were involved in a diverse range of cultural activities.Foster, as Spencer points out, "fulfilled his mother's expectations of academic achievement," while, at the same time, cultivated a set of social interests that revealed him as "not always the straitlaced son his mother groomed him to
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".