When school reform harms
Defenders of the status quo and those trying to empower students and parents in the K-12 system call themselves reformers. Even the doyenne of the status quo, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, claims to support education "reform."
In Colorado, Denver-centric "reform" organizations like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) promote centralizing decision-making power at the state level rather than in local districts. Their view of education reform is to promote one-size-fits-all solutions to the state legislature or costly ballot initiatives to benefit a few districts while treating counties like ours as expendable and our students as mini-ATMs.
In Colorado, reform used to mean empowering parents and communities by creating choice — for example, the legislation authored by then-state Sen. Bill Owens created charter schools and established open enrollment. Peter Groff also had a long history of defending charter schools when he was in the state Senate. Even initial legislation mandating statewide student assessments was a positive development. Choice requires comparison between district schools, which assessments were initially designed to enable.
However, for the Denver-centric "reform" crowd, "fixing" K-12 has come to mean using the state legislature as an uber statewide school board to press legislation that sounds good in press releases. A great example of this is legislation passed several years ago that, among other things, dramatically increased the hours student spend on assessments and requiring that districts Guest Commentary: When school reform harms - The Denver Post: