The tyranny of top-down education reform (or, if everyone has school choice, is it still a choice?)
So many of the changes being proposed today, regardless of where they come from, share a feature in common: the people proposing them see their reforms as silver bullets, and seem like they won’t be satisfied until their ideas are adopted by everyone.
That’s part of the post below about the problems of top-down education reform, written by Dave Powell, an associate professor of education at Gettysburg College who is also Education Week’s “K-12 Contrarian.” He was a high school social studies for six years in suburban Atlanta, where he earned a certificate from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in 2004. He lives in Gettysburg with, his biography says, “a strong woman and four above average children—just don’t ask for the test scores to prove it.” Last summer, he was project director of “On Hallowed Ground: Gettysburg in History & Memory,” part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’Landmarks of American History & Culture program, and he has mentored several students who have created self-designed majors in American Studies.
By Dave Powell
We have thrown an awful lot of solutions at our educational problems in the past 40 years, some of which have had a positive impact on the school experiences of kids, and some of which haven’t.
Choice? Check. Accountability? Check. Changes to the curriculum? Check. Changes to the way we assess it? Check. Should we hire more teachers? Of course we should. Are there some teachers that ought to be fired? Yes, unfortunately, there are.
And there’s a lot to like about some of the things we’ve done. It’s definitely true that some charter schools have opened doors for kids who might otherwise have been stuck in under-performing schools, and certainly true that the innovative curricula and expanded extracurricular opportunities offered at some schools have enriched the lives of many students and teachers all across the country.
Schools that have held the line on class sizes and prioritized the hiring of teachers — few and far between though they may seem to be — have done themselves, and the students they serve, a huge favor. It is also undeniably true that there are some teachers out there who ought to find work in some other field, either because their commitment to teaching has passed its expiration date or because they were never well-suited to the work to begin with.
Still, for all the terrible ideas floating around out there, there are an awful lot of good ones too. One of the things that makes our public school system so great is our willingness to try new things to make it better. Adlai Stevenson once said that the most American thing about America is the free common school system. Our inclination to experiment with it is quintessentially American too, and something we should be proud of.
That’s easy to forget in this age of top-down education reform. So many of the changes being proposed today, regardless of where they come from, share a feature in common: the people proposing them see their reforms as silver The tyranny of top-down education reform (or, if everyone has school choice, is it still a choice?) - The Washington Post:
