The Value of Hopeful Skepticism in the Education Reform Debate
Freddie deBoer has a long post up on education reform, responding broadly to the education reform movement. He writes:
I am incredibly skeptical about the efficacy of constantly banded-about educational reform efforts. I am, for obvious reasons, deeply suspicious of the motivations of many involved in education reform, whether conservatives who hate unions, Democratic constituencies, and government efforts like public schooling, or corporate interests who seek to make money by destroying public education and replacing it with their own, accountability-free private surrogates. I do believe that poverty matters, that race matters, that the presence of a stable home life matters, that parent’s education level matters, and that community matters. I believe these things for the sensible reason that I am empirically justified in believing them. But do I believe that school quality means nothing? That teacher quality means nothing? That there is no room for positive impacts on education because uncontrollable variables are too powerfully determinative? I do not. Nobody I know in the academy does. Nobody I know of, at all, does.
The fact of the matter is that you can at once believe that socioeconomic factors and other input-