CURMUDGUCATION: The Flawed Premises of Reform

CURMUDGUCATION: The Flawed Premises of Reform:
The Flawed Premises of Reform

In Friday's Washington Post, Mike Petrilli and Chester Finn, the current and former chiefs of the right-tilted thinky tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, set out to create a quick, simple history of modern education reform. It's aimed mostly at saying, "Look, we have most of the bugs worked out now!" But it also lays bare just what failed assumptions have been behind fifteen years of failed reformster ideas.

They start by throwing our gaze back a decade to when "US education policies were a mess." Then:

At the core of the good idea was the common-sense insight that if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning, measure whether our kids are meeting them and hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.

And there are most of the problems with the reformsters approach, laid out in one sentence.

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning

Yeah, that sounds sort of sensible, but the problem that first lurked in the background and then CURMUDGUCATION: The Flawed Premises of Reform: