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Thursday, June 14, 2012

This Week In Education: Reform: The Problem With "Parents Across America"

This Week In Education: Reform: The Problem With "Parents Across America":


Reform: The Problem With "Parents Across America"

There's a small but very active group called Parents Across America that's been around the last year and change, usually criticizing reform measures like turnarounds, value-added, and the parent trigger.
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Their criticisms are all fine and good -- I have my own issues with many reform priorities.  But I do have at least one big issues with them.  (Or really two, but they're closely related.)
No, it's not the issue of whether they've received any money from the teachers unions. [They have, apparently, but I don't care.]  No, it's not that PAA is a private subsidiary of Leonie Haimsen's Class Size Matters.  [Nonprofit doesn't mean corporate or capitalist in my book.]  No, it's not even increasingly ridiculous claims that PAA makes about reformers and those like me who raise questions about their allegations. [Though I have to admit the paranoia and name-calling are really annoying.]
It's actually a problem that PAA shares with its sworn opponents, the school reform community.  Like many reform group leaders, PAA is mostly not from the low-income minority communities or the dysfunctional schools that are the the focus of so much reform attention, and it's not at all clear that