How school reform has failed the test
Few education policies are built from a deep knowledge of schools, the teachers who work in them, or the students who attend them. In an article in The American Scholar’s Winter, 2015 edition, scholar Mike Rose takes us into life in the classroom, and from that vantage point examines the pitfalls of contemporary school reform. I am running parts of the article — titled “School Reform Fails the Test: How can our schools get better when we have made teachers the problem and not the solution?” — with the permission of Rose and the journal.
Rose is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and author of books that include Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, and “Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”
He begins:
During the first wave of what would become the 30-year school reform movement that shapes education policy to this day, I visited good public school classrooms across the United States, wanting to compare the rhetoric of reform, which tended to be abstract and focused on crisis, with the daily efforts of teachers and students who were making public education work.I identified teachers, principals, and superintendents who knew about local schools; college professors who taught teachers; parents and community activists who were involved in education. What’s going on in your area that seems promising? I asked. What are teachers talking about? Who do parents hold in esteem? In all, I interviewed and often observed in action more than 60 teachers and 25 administrators in 30-some schools. I also met many students and parents from the communities I visited. What soon became evident–and is still true today–was an intellectual and social richness that was rarely discussed in the public sphere or in the media. I tried to capture this travelogue of educational achievement in a book published in 1995 called Possible Lives: The Promise ofHow school reform has failed the test - The Washington Post: