Hoover Institution Experts Identify 2011's Best & Worst Education Events
To inform the public and shape education reform in the upcoming year, members of the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education today released their annual list of the top five best and top five worst events in American education in 2011. Their list indicates that several positive developments led to greater parental choice, system transparency and teacher accountability; however, the worst events indicate that there remains considerable room for improvement.
“We evaluated hundreds of events, laws, programs, and studies in creating this list,” said Williamson M. Evers, Hoover research fellow and project coordinator of the Education Task Force's Best and Worst project.
Topping the list as the best educational development in 2011 is reinvigorating school choice via opportunity scholarships and vouchers. The result is private school choice moved ahead in many parts of the country in 2011. The worst development in 2011, according to the task force, has been the misreporting of the Atlanta Public Schools' cheating scandal. Here, Evers said, “when educators couldn't successfully teach their students, they doctored the students' test papers, but the news media let the cheating educators off the hook.”
According to Evers, when the task force considered the most counterproductive or foolish developments, it looked for major steps backward. Task force members, Evers said, were dismayed when union power “stopped school districts from making needed reforms” or when a governor's “utopian philosophy” blocked “the possible in the name of the impossible.” Task force members found the Obama administration and both parties in Congress were “dismal” when it came to administering reform programs and fixing laws that need updating.
But task force members were heartened when parental power was strengthened in California
Read more: http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/11/11/b2157776/hoover-institution-experts-identify-2011s-best-worst-education-events#ixzz1fCh7ZIjY