What Works Best: Help or Punishment?
Dear Deborah,
Your last column reminded me of fruitless debates that I have had with education "reformers" who are extremely certain about their views. They are convinced that they have exactly the right solutions for fixing schools—firing teachers and closing schools—and that anyone who disagrees with them is a "defender of the status quo." I have heard exactly this charge, again and again.
A friend and former student, Kevin Kosar, created a fascinating graph in which he traced the historical usage of the term "failing schools." The term was seldom used until the mid-1990s, when it appeared with frequency. After 2000, it became a common term. Now we hear public officials use the label often and unquestioningly. There are many ways to interpret Kosar's chart. Perhaps there was an explosion of "failing schools," beginning in the late 1990s; or, perhaps federal policy created the terminology, preferring to blame the schools for low performance rather than to look at other possible causes, such as poverty, language, or resources. So are the schools failing because the staff is incompetent, or do the schools have low scores because they serve many children with high needs? I tend to think it is the latter, but the corporate reformers are quite certain that schools with low scores