Education Law

Is education reform just hype?

BoardBuzz is a big fan of Valerie Strauss. She writes The Washington Post blog, The Answer Sheet. She recently highlighted a great commentary piece by Anthony Cody, who was a science teacher in Oakland for 18 years and founder of the website Teachers Lead. His commentary originally appeared on the Teacher Magazine?s website.

We couldn’t agree more with Cody assessment, which notes:

Education reformers have invested billions of dollars in numerous ventures that promote their vision, and we’ll see them in the next few weeks. The release of the documentary Waiting for Superman, NBC?s Education Nation specials and teacher town hall, and D.C. Schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates on The Oprah Winfrey Show — all will create a crescendo of voices, images and the master narrative that has been carefully developed over the past decade

That narrative goes like this: Our schools are failing. The only way to save them is to expand charters, remove due process for teachers so they can be fired, and further raise the stakes on standardized test scores.

But ideologically driven projects like this have a way of over reaching, over-promising, and overestimating their strength. And the moment that they reach their apex is actually the moment they begin to collapse. Education reform has finally jumped the shark.

The signs of its imminent collapse are all around us.

They begin with the fundamental problem the education reform movement faces. We are more than 10 years into a massive reform effort revolving around high stakes attached to standardized tests, and there is no significant growth in actual learning — even in terms of the test scores most valued by proponents.

So what do you think? Is education reform bringing positive change to education?

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on September 22, 2010 (boomark / email).