MAY 02, 2011
April 28, 2011; Source: Education Week | Those of us who learned about the need for school reform by reading Jonathan Kozol’s, “Death at an Early Age” and “Savage Inequalities,” sometimes wonder about what has happened to the concept of “reform.” Kozol was (and is) an advocate for not only an equalization of the resources available to richer and poorer schools, but also for a pedagogy that goes beyond proxies of achievement (test scores, etc.) to stimulate an educational process of effervescent intellectual creativity.
Another Boston-area educator, Alfie Kohn, has written a thought-provoking critique of school reform as it is practiced today, describing school reform as “mostly top-down policies: Divert public money to quasi-private charter schools, pit states against one