CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA, Teachers, and Business Models

CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA, Teachers, and Business Models:

ESSA, Teachers, and Business Models

Thomas Arnett is an Education Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and he's written some classics in the reformster press (like this piece about why teachers shouldn't grade their own students). He has worked for Achievement First Charter and started his educationist career with TFA. So it would make sense to find some of his work on the website of the Brookings Institute, an organization that does an outstanding job of regularly publicizing how little economists understand about education.

"ESSA Unlocks Teacher Prep Innovation" wears its lack of educational understanding on its sleeve. ESSA presents an opportunity, but it's not an opportunity to improve anything about education-- instead, Arnett's understanding of the issues facing education is in this sentence:

But unfortunately, despite the fair amount of consensus regarding needed reforms, schools of education seem to have done little over the last 30 years to fundamentally change their business models to align with suggested reforms.

Yup. What teacher programs need is a new business model.

Arnett's theory is that university education programs are resistant to change because their business models discourage it. And I get that to a point-- as universities and colleges have changed to business models that are based on them acting like businesses instead of institutions of higher learning, getting warm, check-writing bodies in seats has become more of a priority. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that schools of education haven't changed anything in the last several CURMUDGUCATION: ESSA, Teachers, and Business Models: