Who Controls American Education? A Guide for Laymen

"After all it is the experts – the school administrator, the professor of education, the accrediting officer, the staff members of state departments of education, and the managers of numerous professional organizations – it is these experts, sharing much the same background and outlook and having been through homogeneous training programs for advanced degrees in schools of education, who lay claim to special knowledge that is supposed to distinguish them from 'the rest of us.' It has been out of deference to this specialized knowledge that the rest of us have allowed the expert to exert as much control as he now does over educational policy. If I could leave the reader with only one impression in this book, I would like him to take away the conviction that all of us have badly over-estimated the quality and the extent of expert knowledge in education." ~~ James D. Koerner in "Who Controls American Education?"