What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: Four Decades of Education Reform
I get a real kick out the best-of lists that pop up at the end of the year. Two years ago, the First Decade of the New Millennium had passed into ignominy, so there was a lot commentary on the establishment of the No Child era: What was the great cosmic takeaway for educators?
While there are always transformative events and legislation, most real change in education feels sluggish, rather random and exceedingly difficult to analyze. Education policy thinkers tend to be Covey-esque in the upbeat, step-wise way they approach change: anticipate, arrange, administer and assess. That’s how we got No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to be the Grand Strategy to identify inequities, raise and equalize standards (a word meaning different things to different stakeholders), harass teachers into somehow teaching better, and then