Next on school reformers’ agenda
According to Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, school reformers aren’t resting on their laurels and have some new goals in mind.
These are things reformers look on as successes: Most states have approved the Common Core State Standards and changed teacher evaluations to include student standardized test scores. Teacher tenure and collective bargaining have come under assault. Charter schools and vouchers are a big part of the reform movement — even if it remains true that the vast majority of America’s children are educated in traditional public schools.
In this piece on the Fordham Institute’s blog, Flypaper, he writes about a recent meeting of members of the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) Network and state-based reform advocacy groups. Reformers, he said, are working on these issues now in state legislatures: teacher preparation, principal licensure, pension reform and digital learning.
If you think that reformers have been unkind to teachers — by, say, unfairly linking their