The School Reform Boondoggle

If the reader has followed this blog in any regard, he has noted the author's disdain for the school reform movement. Briefly, most reformers are well-trained and versed, and their ideas are generally usable and defensible in some regard. However, the reform/testing/accountability model has proven to be costly in terms of money and time. One could easily make the case that the current budgetary mess is directly caused by the high performing school reform movement.

Before I go further, I am going to provide a link to an article that anyone with serious interest must read. It is not very long, but it highlights in an effective way the statistics and correlative reasoning behind most of the premises of this article. Heres the link: http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html. This blog format will not allow me to make the URL a hyperlink, so you will need to copy and paste it into your browser.

The school reform movement was born around 1980, with the Chicken Little response to "A Nation at Risk." That study alerted leaders to serious deficiencies in American schools, and it took a good twenty years before enough traction was gained to have the Federal government intervene and make the mess even worse.

The article referenced above DOES NOT maintain that American schools are doing great and that all the initiatives are unnecessary. Rather, the author's conclusion is that all of the worries about American competitiveness are genuine and worrisome. However, the focus of the article is the manner in which school leaders misinterpret the statistics - I think purposefully.

Simply put, the gap between the US and the rest of the world is misleading in some ways. For a long time, the US education model was internationally successful. However, as the rest of the world has closed the socioeconomic gap, US aggregate superiority has evaporated. ALL of our students do not perform as well as the best on the world stage. Again, if you think I am trotting out the same old teaching community excuses and defenses, please read the article.

When socioeconomic parallels are drawn, US students outperform the world in many, if not all, areas and subgroups.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that the reformers have been, and will continue to be, misleading on purpose. If the data says that the most crucial way to improve our global competitiveness is to improve our economic status, so that we do not have such a high percentage of students below the poverty level, then the sundry reform initiatives don't command such attention - and so many dollars.

School leaders NEED for the public to believe that their proposals will make a difference, because they need to justify their existence. Reform gurus need to tout their ideas, and to convince school boards to spend money on them, or they cannot capitalize on the millions of dollars to be spent.

The truth is that schools need to continue to work toward improvement, in their own self-monitored and intiated ways. I maintain that no local school will benefit from a reform initiative as much as they might benefit from internally generated improvement. Researching and devising ideas is necessary, but adopting the plans that have worked for others, in vastly different cultures and communities, is foolish, expensive, and doomed to less effectiveness, in my opinion.