A Force for Real Education Reform Emerges
Posted on: Wednesday October 9th, 2013
Education “reform” wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.
Education “reform” wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.In an ironic coda to the No Child Left Behind era last week, Texas officially turned its back on George W. Bush’s policy triumph by opting out of his signature mandate for schools to achieve “adequate yearly progress.”
Topping the irony of The Lone Star State rejecting a policy based on the Texas Miracle, the leader of the Beltway’s newest brand of “education reform,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, lashed out at critics of his signature education policy, Race to the Top, by saying they … wait for it … “inhabit a Washington bubble.”
Along with those who want “government hands off my Medicare” and Congressional Representatives who insist on being paid while they cut off wages to other federal employees, purveyors of education policy have clearly descended into nonsense.
As the country pivots from the failures of NCLB, what’s needed is not an insistence on the same brand of policies or the outright rejection of those who believe there is a better way forward, but a new course for real education reform based on traditional values that made public education an enduring American institution to begin with.
That new course is indeed emerging in a movement coming not from a Washington bubble but from communities across America.
Community And Labor Organizing Together
At a hotel in downtown Los Angeles last week, hundreds of activists and organizers gathered to voice a common commitment to public education and to plan specific courses of action to disrupt what most in the audience described as a “corporate model of school reform.”
The participants included labor leaders, educators, clergy, members of immigrant communities, civil rights activists, representatives from
