John Thompson: A Bad Week for Anti-Union Education Reformers
Guest post by John Thompson.
I first recoiled at Arthur Levine's tired old vision of schools in his Education Week Commentary "The Plight of Teachers' Unions." Levine seemed to argue that resistance against high-stakes testing is doomed. He seemed to believe that the future belongs to a new generation of standards-driven schooling. He implied that unions, for instance, were on the wrong side of history in resisting NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg's test-score-based evaluations and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's school closing campaign.
Then I read the rest of the newsmagazine of record. Not all is lost! Nearly a half of the issue described various aspects of today's backlashes against school "reform." Around 40% of the articles discussed promising new approaches to school improvement. So, I went back to Levine's dusty old analysis in the hopes that Ed Week was merely reprinting a twenty year old commentary from back in the day - before test-driven "reform,"
I first recoiled at Arthur Levine's tired old vision of schools in his Education Week Commentary "The Plight of Teachers' Unions." Levine seemed to argue that resistance against high-stakes testing is doomed. He seemed to believe that the future belongs to a new generation of standards-driven schooling. He implied that unions, for instance, were on the wrong side of history in resisting NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg's test-score-based evaluations and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's school closing campaign.
Then I read the rest of the newsmagazine of record. Not all is lost! Nearly a half of the issue described various aspects of today's backlashes against school "reform." Around 40% of the articles discussed promising new approaches to school improvement. So, I went back to Levine's dusty old analysis in the hopes that Ed Week was merely reprinting a twenty year old commentary from back in the day - before test-driven "reform,"