The Ghost of Ed Reform Past -- and the Hope of Ed Reform Future
Editor's note: This post was originally written for Edutopia.
As 2011 winds to a close, we are about to turn the page on a year that saw new evidence suggesting that the education reform policies du jour aren't really working. Most charter schools perform no better than traditional public schools (at least in Chicago); value-added modeling does not produce consistent, reliable measures of teacher effectiveness; and the school curriculum is narrowing, in part because of the pressures of state tests (according to teachers).
Student performance on standardized assessments has remainedstubbornly flat during the past few years (though much more progress has been made in math than reading). And despite all our efforts over the past
