What Is the Goal of School Reform?
by Michael B. Katz and Mike Rose
The following is adapted from “Public Education Under Siege,” a collection of essays on the wider range of educational, social and economic issues that should be addressed in contemporary school reform.
No reform movement in any domain—the law, agricultural development, education—can do everything, and it is an unreasonable demand that it try. Reform movements need to be selective, and need to be clear and focused. In some ways the current mainstream education reforms are just that: Standardized test scores are used as a measure of achievement; a teacher’s effectiveness is determined by improvement in those scores; funds are awarded by competition, and so on. Yet, though it is unreasonable to demand everything, it is legitimate to scrutinize what is left out—for something left out might be crucial to the success of what is left in—and it is legitimate to question whether the reforms themselves contain within them elements that could unintentionally subvert the very goals of reform.
One of the problems with current reform is that there does not seem to be an elaborated philosophy of education or theory of learning underlying the current reform movement. There is an implied philosophy and it is a basic economic/human capital one: Education is necessary for individual economic advantage and for national economic stability. This focus is legitimate but incomplete, for it narrows the purpose of education in a democracy, which should also include intellectual, social, civic, and ethical development. The theory of