Thoughtful education reform advocates sometimes pause and ask whether their efforts are working. Elliot Haspel surveys the landscape and points out some inconvenient truths.
There is no reason to think that, on our current course, the conversation will be meaningfully different in 2025 or 2035. We simply have no empirical evidence that the prevailing reform theory of change can dramatically transform outcomes for kids at a significant scale. Not a single major school system in the entire country has accomplished this or is on track to accomplishing this.
We need a new iteration of the reform movement, a third-way movement that integrates everything we know about great schools, everything we know about fighting the effects of poverty, and everything we know about systems change.
This philosophy—high expectations, high supports, and high coherence—will forge a new path where excellence and equity can be found everywhere, and may just find us a way out of the current education wars.
He's right to call for humility. He's right about the effects of poverty, and the need to counteract them.
But it's possible to look at the concerns he raises, and reach a different conclusion: Reformers haven't done nearly enough to fundamentally transform the education system. Some 25 years ago, the late John Chubb and Terry Moe looked at the school reforms of the 1980s, and argued those efforts doomed to fail in a system where schools remained subject to political control and parents weren't truly free to choose among them.
They called for full school choice and near-total school autonomy.
In principle, choice officers a clear, sharp break with the institutional past. In practice, however, it has been forced into the same mold with all the others. It has been embraced half-heartedly, in bits and pieces, as a means of granting parents and students additional options or of giving schools more incentives to compete - popular moves that can be accomplished without changing the existing system in any fundamental way. Choice has simply been part of the grab-bag, one of many system-preserving reforms that presumably make democratic control work better.
Is there a city or school district in America where their diagnosis doesn't still ring true?
Meanwhile...
Barack Obama has built a Democratic school choice legacy by supporting charters.
The new rewrite of federal education laws wouldn't make Title I funding fully portable, but it would support school choice in other ways.
Charter schools face another setback in Washington as the State Supreme Court declines to rehear a ruling that found them unconstitutional. That creates uncertainty for more than 1,000 families.
Groups educate parents about Nevada's new ESA program amid concern over military families' eligibility.
Urban charters have more impact than suburban ones.
More evidence closing schools can improve performance.
A legal dispute over religious schools and Montana tax credit scholarships.
School choice supporters celebrate 25 years of Milwaukee vouchers.
California online charters might unionize.
ICYMI, this week on redefinED
We concluded our four-part series on a colossal school choice plan in California. If you haven't already, check out parts one, two and three.
Tweet of the week
Summit Sierra Charter School students in Governor Inslee's chamber. #Act4WAstudents#saveWacharter schools #walegpic.twitter.com/PPWHjZRz4C
— Liv Finne (@livfinne) November 19, 2015
Quote of the week
“I found a lot of pain and frustration from parents who didn’t have resources to pay for a tutor or remediation when their student wasn’t doing well at school,” she said. “When I talk to families (about the ESA) they say, ‘Hey, this is good news!’”
— Coco Llenas, a Nevada school choice advocate working to inform parents about her state's new ESA program.
Share your good news (or bad news, or suggestions or criticism) at tpillow[at]sufs[dot]org. We'll be off next Sunday to observe Thanksgiving. We hope you have a wonderful holiday.
