Thinking about “Corporate Reform”–Part 2 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Thinking about “Corporate Reform”–Part 2 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Thinking about “Corporate Reform”–Part 2

by larrycuban

Positive Outcomes from Three Decades of Economic-driven School Reforms

1. Hastened shift from defining school effectiveness as the level of resources that go into schooling children and youth to an exclusive concentration on outcomes.

Since the late-19^th century, policymakers judged the quality of schools and their effectiveness by how much money was spent per-student, the credentials teachers possessed, the worth of buildings, and instructional resources given to teachers and students—what economists called “inputs.”
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