Thinking about “Corporate Reform”–Part 2
Positive Outcomes from Three Decades of Economic-driven School Reforms
The use of student test scores to assess school effectiveness and student learning began in the mid-1960s when the U.S. Congress mandated that scores from standardized tests be used to evaluate the success of Title I programs targeting low-income schools in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. By the end of the 1970s, urban school reformers had begun to compare and contrast those high-scoring urban elementary schools enrolling largely poor and minority children with schools in neighborhoods with similar enrollments that were low-performers. Ronald Edmonds and others noted the factors that were associated with high performing schools and throughout the 1980s, Effective Schools programs spread slowly across urban districts.
With the publication of Nation at Risk in 1983 and frequent media attention to where U.S. students ranked on
- Hastened shift from defining school effectiveness as the level of resources that go into schooling children and youth to an exclusive concentration on outcomes.
The use of student test scores to assess school effectiveness and student learning began in the mid-1960s when the U.S. Congress mandated that scores from standardized tests be used to evaluate the success of Title I programs targeting low-income schools in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. By the end of the 1970s, urban school reformers had begun to compare and contrast those high-scoring urban elementary schools enrolling largely poor and minority children with schools in neighborhoods with similar enrollments that were low-performers. Ronald Edmonds and others noted the factors that were associated with high performing schools and throughout the 1980s, Effective Schools programs spread slowly across urban districts.
With the publication of Nation at Risk in 1983 and frequent media attention to where U.S. students ranked on