Frederick M. Hess's Blog
Book Review: The Virtue of Speaking Plain Truths
by Frederick M. Hess • Jul 19, 2010 at 9:29 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
 Print |  Send |  RSS |
Last week, I was grumbling about the potentially unhealthy influence of edu-agitprop and the inclination of many would-be reformers to approach education reform as a simple, and simple-minded, moral crusade. I'll start the new week on a happier note, as a trio of straight-shooting reformers--all of them comfortable with messy truths - have penned an unvarnished, eye-opening account of what it means to struggle to transform K-12 schooling.
In Ohio's Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Frontlines, Fordham Institute chief Checker Finn, Fordham VP for Ohio Terry Ryan, and veteran scribe Mike Lafferty recount the Fordham Institute's efforts to, in their words, "help launch new schools; to fix broken older schools; to assist needy families to make their way into better education options--and to duke it out with powerful institutional resistances, reform-averse politicians, and adult interests bent on maintaining the status quo." (Full disclosure: the book was published, with my enthusiastic recommendation, as part of the "Education Policy" series I co-edit for Palgrave Macmillan).
When I read the manuscript back last fall, I was struck by the authors' verve, lack of posturing, and healthy willingness to acknowledge missteps and frustrations. As readers well know, one can scour shelves of airbrushed accounts of reform before stumbling across the rare volume that sheds light on what didn't work and why, which really helps us understand why reform is so bloody hard. This is that rare volume.
The authors showcased their take in a terrific column for Fordham's Education Gadfly recently, one in which they unapologetically described Fordham's adventures in charter school authorizing as "humbling." They recounted, "One of our sponsored schools imploded in a fashion worthy of a Greek tragedy. Just a few years ago, the W.E.B. Dubois Academy in Cincinnati was visited by the (then) governor [and] lauded in the U.S.
