Routledge Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up

Education is threatened on a global scale by forces of neoliberalism, through high stakes accountability, privatization and a destructive language of learning. In all respects, a GERM (Global Education Reform Movement) has erupted from international benchmark rankings such as PISA, TIMMS and PIRL, causing inequity, narrowing of the curriculum and teacher deprofessionalization on a truly global scale. In this book, teachers from around the world and other educational experts such as Andy Hargreaves, Ann Lieberman, Stephen Ball, Gert Biesta, Tom Bennett and many more, make the case to move away from this uneducational economic approach, to instead embrace a more humane, more democratic approach to education. This approach is called ‘flipping the system’, a move that places teachers exactly where they need to be - at the steering wheel of educational systems worldwide. This book will appeal to teachers and other education professionals around the world. Review "This book is a collection of powerful essays to examine, critique and even promise emancipation from what it describes as the deleterious, neoliberal reforms of education systems around the world over the past couple of decades. Articles from an international array of teachers, academics and writers…are packed into this fascinating and fairly dense academic read. […] the thrust of the book is positive and leaves the reader with six guidelines of future action…"– InTuition "This book takes a scholarly look at a world-wide issue… teachers from around the world and other educational experts, make the case to move away from this uneducational economic approach, to instead embrace a more humane, more democratic approach to education. This approach is called ‘flipping the system’, a move that places teachers exactly where they need to be - at the steering wheel of educational systems worldwide. It's not a book to be tackled by the faint-hearted, but once you become engrossed in the book, it is a fascinating read and a reassuring look at where teachers really should be - at the very centre of education systems, driving them forward." – Parent in Touch "This book strongly advocates that if teachers are to have any real agency in their work they need to be involved in defining the goal of the education they are providing […] This book is an antidote, if enacted, to the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement) – the neo-liberalisation of education." – Peter Gossman, Educational Developments "The authors provide a critical and passionate appeal to teachers and educational experts around the world to move away from the dominant economic approach and embrace a more humane path to a better education system, more focused on people. This book can be a useful instrument to inform educational policies in the world, because it faces four fundamental questions of all educational debates through a global perspective." - Stefania Capogna,  Italian Journal of Sociology of Education "This book, with its avowed commitment to democratic and ‘educational’ forms of professionalism, is an important resource for teachers and one that has the potential to enable teacher professionals in these uncertain times to re-imagine their work beyond prevailing educational orthodoxies." – David Hall, Journal of Education for Teaching "I am going to recommend 'Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground up', edited by Jelmer Ever and René Kneyber not because I am in it but because it challenges the reader to think differently about education. This is a book not about improvement, quality and excellence in education but how improvement, quality and excellence get in the way of thinking about what education is for, how it might work differently, and how it might actually contribute to making the world a better place. Now that is something to think about between dips in the pool." -Stephen J Ball is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Educat