Against Barriers to a New Educational Paradigm
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A question came to me the other day: have we given education reforms enough time to really say one way or another whether they have been successful?
Does data showing the ineffectiveness of charters, for instance, have enough time behind it to be truly conclusive? Or did Gates try for long enough with his idea for small schools?
The answer I keep coming up with is: no.
The current crop of reforms have only been tried in earnest for just under a decade, and in many places for far shorter. Reformers, impatient for results which make reforms politically feasible, switch from one reform to the next, anxious to increase test scores. And the critics point to every poor result as though it were definitive.
But really, we need reforms. We need to break all institutional barriers to a new way of conceiving education in