The gap between school reform rhetoric and reality in 3 cities
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A new report looks at the results of school reform in three major cities and finds that reformers’ claims about success don’t exactly match reality. Here’s a piece on it by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.
By Elaine Weiss
Across the country, a wave of school reform based on market principles has taken hold, championed by leaders like former District of Columbia Public Schools and New York City Public Schools Chancellors Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein. Dozens of states fulfilling grant requirements under Race to the Top, or implementing those plans even in the absence of a grant, are, essentially, trying to replicate the purported success of then-Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan’s signature Renaissance 2010 initiative. But school administrators and city leaders rushing to mimic Rhee, Klein and Duncan should take a step back and reconsider. A new report from the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education finds their real-life prospects, in the best of circumstances, to be pretty poor.
Since the onset of their respective reform agendas, all three districts – New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. — have participated in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), which provides district-level scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). All of the TUDA districts, 10 in 2003 and now are 21, are large, high-poverty and heavily minority, so the study enables apples-to-apples comparisons of growth over time using a reliable, consistent measure of learning.
The lack of a solid evidentiary basis for these reforms made us suspect that the results would be less rosy than what reformers publicly touted. As we explored the NAEP data, however,
