America's educational leaders seem to be experts at starting and fighting wars over our children's education, rather than experts in building it.
In the 1980s we fought the reading wars, and in the 1990s, we battled over mathematics: Do students learn to read out of their experience with language or should they be taught phonics? Do reading textbooks do the best job, or is it more effective to get children to read voluminously? In math, we argued about whether "real world problems" should drive the curriculum, and fought about whether it was useful to let students invent their own methods for calculation.
And these wars had costs. American students were, overall, neither learning to read or to do math well enough. The education wars absorbed resources that could have been better deployed in
