Again, Niche Reforms Are Not The Answer
Our guest author today is David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, and a member of the Shanker Institute’s board of directors.
A recent response to my previous post on these pages helps to underscore one of my central points: If there is no clarity about what it will take to improve schools, it will be difficult to design a system that can do it. In a recent essay in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough wrote that education reformers who advocated “no excuses” schooling were now making excuses for reformed schools’ weak performance. He explained why: “ Most likely for the same reason that urban educators from an earlier generation made excuses: successfully educating large numbers of low-income kids is very, very hard.”
In his post criticizing my initial essay, “What does it mean to ‘fix the system’?,” the Fordham Institute’s Chris