Where Are Progressives In The Fight To Save Public Schools?
This post is republished from the Education Opportunity Network, a new online publication edited by Jeff Bryant.This week, here was Paul Krugman’s assessment of the current policy agenda governing the nation’s public schools:
“We have the illusion of consensus, an illusion based on a process in which anyone questioning the preferred narrative is immediately marginalized, no matter how strong his or her credentials.”
Except, Krugman wasn’t writing about education policy, actually. He was writing about the nation’s run up to the Iraq War ten years ago. “Support for the war,” Krugman recalled, ” became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration.”
Krugman compared the type of “groupthink” that preceded the war in Iraq to the current false consensus driving our nation’s flawed economic policy. But he may as well have been writing about the nation’s education policy as well.
For years, federal education policies have been characterized by a “Washington Consensus” http://www.aei.org/article/education/whither-the-washington-consensus/ that public schools are effectively broken