Networking High Performance in New York’s Secondary Education: The Regents Curriculum Story

In the United States many efforts have been made to improve our public educational system, yet, as a nation, we are still skeptical about its future. Attempts at reform have created debates, leaving Americans pessimistic, or at best, uncertain. David Wiles’ book provides a positive look at public education reform by investigating the improvement of secondary programs in New York State. His study supports the value of the Regents program. He argues that Regents stabilizes the quality of the secondary education curriculum. He also reasons that the best Regents programs will spread from a few school districts to help create a systematic reform agenda. The study identifies the best performing public school districts in the state of New York by using standards of mastery in nine Regents subjects and graduation rates. The author discusses sixty-six K-12 districts which have the most exemplary Regents programs, and he shows how these districts will continue to lead New York State reform through the end of the century. He also suggests that the device for reform initiatives is found in the Japanese idea of kieretsu or networking through horizontal associations of the best districts. Wiles’ book will provide excellent reading for persons in state and district education departments who are leading reform efforts to improve education. It is also a useful text for graduate courses needing details of education reform cases. Its methodological arguments and its conceptual discussions will appeal to students and scholars anywhere who are interested in the future of the United States public educational system.